


followed the telegraph wires to the map to your soul

by eneiryu



Series: the history of our histories [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Diplomacy, Learning How to Set Yourself Free, M/M, Politics, Road Trips, We Make Ourselves Our Own Prisons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:01:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 51,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25164328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eneiryu/pseuds/eneiryu
Summary: Theo’s first mistake is in telling Liam that he can’t come with Theo to Boston to deliver the magical artifact that Lydia needs for her experiment. His second mistake is in assuming that Liam wouldlisten.
Relationships: Liam Dunbar/Theo Raeken
Series: the history of our histories [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2006026
Comments: 91
Kudos: 256





	followed the telegraph wires to the map to your soul

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly the summary for this story could really be [this](https://rorsy.tumblr.com/post/174255310151/vexahliaderolo-i-love-soft-mutual-pining-roadtrip), with a healthy (?) mix of my usual complicating elements of pack politics, self-sabotage (both knowing and unknowing), and these two's general inability to use their words with each other. Enjoy!
> 
> Credit, as is now customary--and I will never be able to thank them enough for it, both for the general assists with plotting and for the excellent beta reading--to [snaeken](https://archiveofourown.org/users/snaeken) and [ExtraSteps](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExtraSteps/pseuds/ExtraSteps).
> 
> Also: if you've got prompts in _this_ 'verse, let me know. I do not feel done with it at all.

“This seems,” Liam opines, from somewhere behind Theo as Theo continues throwing clothes into one of the two duffel bags splayed open on his bed; the fact that Theo can’t see him makes Theo— _understandably!_ —nervous, “like a _massive_ amount of wasted effort. Why can’t you just _fly_ the magical McGuffin to Lydia?”

 _Magical McGuffin?_ Theo thinks. “Magical McGuffin?” He says aloud, and turns around just in time to see Liam—who’d clearly been turning the centuries-old _magical artifact_ over and over in his hands—go to toss the delicate gold object up in the air. Theo makes a high-pitched, completely involuntary noise, and _lunges_ for him. “Liam!”

Liam raises his eyebrows. He doesn’t look all that bothered by Theo’s fingers clamped like _irons_ around his wrists. “What?” He wonders, but he’s smirking obnoxiously, so Theo just rolls his eyes and _carefully_ takes the artifact away from him, setting it back in the drape of fabric lining the old, weathered box sitting on the nightstand by Theo’s bed.

Liam immediately reaches for it again, and Theo jabs a hand against his sternum to knock him back a step and glares at him in warning. Making a face and holding his hands palms-out in the face of Theo’s threatening finger, Liam takes a few pointed steps backwards, until his back hits the loft railing. He leans against it, and cocks his head.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he points out.

Theo considers ignoring him, but Liam is like a small child or unsupervised pet; doing so may be momentarily satisfying but much more likely to lead to long-term consequences. Like, for instance, centuries-old magical artifacts getting tossed around like lacrosse balls. Theo sighs, and retrieves the shirt that he’d thrown frantically aside when he’d lunged for Liam’s wrists and starts actually folding it to put in one of his duffels. 

“Maybe I was distracted by your sterling vocabulary,” Theo mutters, shoving the shirt into the bag and then squinting inside the dark recesses of it as he tries to remember how many he’d already packed. Four, maybe? Five? How many would he need for a two-week long road-trip? He’d have to stop at a laundromat _sometime,_ regardless. “What’d you ask?”

Liam blows an irritated raspberry, but obligingly repeats, “Why can’t you just _fly_ the—whatever-it-is, to Lydia?”

Theo raises his head to look incredulously at him, and then at the artifact lying deceptively quiescent in its box, and then back at Liam. “Because it might _explode_ ,” Theo tells him, giving him a _look_ —which Liam returns with equal disdain—and goes back to trying to decide whether he actually _needs_ another pair of jeans. Three seems reasonable, but almost _too_ reasonable.

“I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not,” Liam admits thoughtfully. The railing behind him groans as he shifts his weight.

Theo huffs, and gives the ceiling a longsuffering look. “The artifact is used to detect instability in the earth’s magics, specifically ley lines.” Liam is circling a hand through the air when Theo glances over at him: _I know this_. Theo’s glance becomes a glare. “So if it gets too far _away_ from the earth’s magics, _it_ might destabilize,” Theo concludes shortly. “I don’t really feel like _testing it out_.”

Liam seems to consider this. “So why can’t Lydia come _here_ to do whatever experiments she needs to complete?”

“Because the Massachusetts ley lines are in _Massachusetts_ ,” Theo answers, giving Liam another unimpressed look.

Liam remains unmoved. “So you got volun-told to bring it to her.”

Theo shrugs. “Considering its origins, I’m the obvious choice.” He manages to say it casually enough, but his guts still twist uncomfortably like they always do when Theo is reminded of—or when he reminds _others_ —of his _own_ origins. If he concentrates, he can still smell the stink of the sewers seeped deep into the wood of the artifact’s protective box. 

He can still smell the acrid _burn_ of the Doctors’ particular brand of parascientific _progress_.

“How long are you going to be gone?” Liam asks.

“A little over two weeks, maybe?” Theo answers absently; his phone had buzzed, and he’d leaned over the edge of his bed to retrieve it. “Argent has some things he wants me to drop off at a handful of other hunter clans on the way, and Deaton needs me to pick up some things from some of the packs.”

“Look at you,” Liam comments, smirking. “Like a little Werewolf Postal Express.”

“I think that’d be Chimera Postal Express, technically,” Theo corrects, still just as absently. Something pricks at the corner of his mind—why the hell was Liam so _interested?_ —but Lydia’s text has him distracted. Yeah, the overlapping of the summer solstice and the Buck Moon _could_ be an issue for her proposed spell, he supposes, though she really needs to ask an actual _druid_. 

_**Theo Raeken:** Maybe? Why are you asking *me*? Ask *Deaton*._

_**Lydia Martin:** I *did* ask Deaton. He said to ask *you*._

Liam says something. Theo looks up. “What?”

“I _said_ ,” Liam repeats, drawing it out extra obnoxiously in punishment, “sounds fun.” 

_**Theo Raeken:** I’ll check the Doctors’ books. I’m going to need more to go on than ‘do you think the summer solstice and Buck Moon overlapping could be an issue,’ though._

_**Lydia Martin:** [several screenshots of a blue-lined notebook with hand-written text]_

_**Lydia Martin:** Need more?_

Theo glares at his screen. He had, admittedly, walked right into that one. Tucking his phone away for the moment, he twists to look at Liam still lounging against the loft railing. Liam is still smirking laconically but there’s something tense to the set of his shoulders. Theo squints at him, nostrils flaring wide.

“Yeah, I guess,” he agrees, and finds himself frustrated when he can’t get anything from Liam’s scent beyond the baseline. Liam smiles winsomely, and it doesn’t touch his eyes. Theo gives up on scenting him, and just _looks_ at him. “Are you okay?”

“Never better,” Liam answers.

\---

“So I’ve been thinking,” comes a voice from over the top of Theo’s head, and by the time he’s looked up and realized it’s _Liam_ , Liam has already dropped down into the chair in front of his desk and slammed his laptop lid shut, “that you driving across the country and back over two weeks _alone?_ Stupid. Someone should go with you.”

He smiles _blindingly_ wide at Theo when Theo glances up at him, Theo’s hands still awkwardly held up in the air from where he’d yanked them back to avoid them getting caught in his unexpectedly-closing laptop lid. Theo drops his hands onto his chair’s armrests and stares at him, his eyes narrowing and his tongue working thoughtfully over the flat edges of his teeth as he slumps back in his chair. Around them, the baseline level of noise and general chaos of the sheriff’s station rolls on uninterrupted.

“What exactly is it that you think is going to happen to me?” Theo wonders. He tries picking at Liam’s scent again, but it’s as inscrutable as it always is, now. Theo blames the born wolves at UCLA—they’d been _way too eager_ to share their tips and tricks.

He thinks, briefly—and with an unexpectedly sharp, and not at all feigned, ache—of when he’d always been able to know what was on Liam’s mind, if not because of his scent then because his heart had always been pinned so blatantly to his sleeve. He shoves the thought aside; it’s not the time.

It’s _never_ the time.

Across from him, Liam is shrugging. “Car crash,” he starts to list, ticking them off his fingers. “Rogue omegas. Rogue _alphas_. One of the packs who’s still holding a grudge could decide that you maybe haven’t served enough of a sentence after all.” He looks straight at Theo. “One of the _hunter_ _clans_ could decide that.”

Theo resists the urge to rub a palm over the tattoos stacked on the inside of his left forearm, but even just _thinking_ about them sets the magics in them to shifting restlessly. Grimacing, Theo turns his arm a little further downwards, hiding at least the Argent fleur-de-lis marking the inside of his elbow from view. The stacked circles of the McCall pack banded around his forearm still show, but there’s not a lot Theo can do about that.

“And you would be helpful in either of those situations _how?_ ” Theo retorts dryly.

Liam tilts his head thoughtfully, seeming to consider it. “I could distract them while you run away,” he decides, and grins like the little shit he is.

Theo just rolls his eyes, and stands. “See, that right there is exactly why you _don’t_ get to come. You’d _cause_ a diplomatic incident.” He snags a few of the case files sitting on his desk and then rounds it, heading for the filing cabinets across the way.

Liam just tips his head back against the back of the chair so that he can watch Theo’s progress without moving. “What, and you _won’t?_ ”

“I know what to say, and how to act,” Theo answers absently, “to _not_ do that.” He concentrates on coaxing open the second drawer of the leftmost filing cabinet—it always sticks, and no amount of the Sheriff’s optimistic WD-40ing has ever changed that fact—so that he doesn’t have to concentrate on _how_ he’d learned what to say, and how to act, to avoid causing diplomatic incidents. The Doctors had certainly been _effective_ , if not particularly _patient_ , teachers.

“I have picked up some stuff over the years, y’know,” Liam points out, still looking at him upside-down. “I’m not an idiot.”

“Sure,” Theo agrees, sliding the files home, and then the drawer closed, before turning back to Liam, “but the details _matter_. And isn’t that what you’re supposed to be doing with _Deaton_ this summer? Learning the details?”

Liam just looks sly. “If I went with _you_ , I could, y’know, learn by doing.”

“Yeah, great,” Theo snorts. “Winging delicate diplomatic interactions.” He shakes his head. “Thanks, but no thanks. You get to stay here, learn with Deaton.”

Liam blows a raspberry, and tips his head back forward to once again follow Theo’s progress as Theo makes his way back to his desk. “My way sounds more fun.”

Theo pauses as he goes to sit back down, frowning at Liam. “You know this trip isn’t a vacation, right?”

Liam’s mouth just goes mulish. “It _sounds_ like a vacation.”

Theo drops back into his seat, and studies Liam across him. “What’s going on with you?”

Liam scowls. “ _Nothing,_ jesus. _Why_ do you keep asking me that?”

“Because _something’s going on with you_ ,” Theo retorts, but then switches tacks; there’s never really any _winning_ an argument with Liam, just various flavors of stalemates. “Besides, it’s your last summer before you graduate college. Don’t you want to, I don’t know, hang out with Mason and Corey and your other friends? Do whatever it is that rising college seniors do the summer before they graduate and have to go out into the real world?”

Something tight flashes across Liam’s face. Theo sharpens his gaze, searching the curve of Liam’s brow and the corners of his mouth and the line of his jaw, but whatever-it-was is already gone, and Liam’s rolling his eyes and huffing as he complains, “Can you _not_ talk like you’re some kind of alien? We’re almost the same age.”

“Yeah,” Theo says, granting him the point, “but I never went to college.”

“And whose fault is _that?_ ” Liam shoots back, unimpressed. “Scott and Argent and everybody _said_ you could go. Hell, Scott practically _begged_ you to, after he finished forcing you to get your GED.”

Theo just shrugs. Arguments with Liam: no winning, only stalemates. The magics in the tattoos on his arm shift again. He slumps back a little further in his chair, and watches Liam watch him. Liam’s jaw tightens. He’d come in here draped in an irreverent sort of _laissez-faire_ ease, like he considered everything about the situation—up to and including himself—a joke, but that’s gone now. Theo’s chest, and Tara’s heart beating within it, ache a little again.

“I’ll make you a deal,” Theo finally offers, meeting Liam’s eyes and _holding_ them. “You tell me what’s actually going on with you, and you can come. No more questions asked.”

Liam’s jaw stays clamped shut. If anything, it shuts _harder_.

Theo exhales out a low, disappointed breath. “Yeah,” he says quietly, pushing himself back to his feet and unplugging his laptop from its dock before tucking it under his arm. “That’s what I thought.”

He stops by the edge of Liam’s chair. Liam doesn’t look up at him, just continues to glower resolutely at the wall behind Theo’s vacated chair. Theo sighs again and shakes his head.

“See you in a few weeks, Liam,” he says, and leaves Liam sitting there as he heads for the station exit.

\---

But Theo makes a rookie mistake: he leaves his car unattended while he runs up to the McCall-Argent condo for a final check-in before he leaves. 

It unlocks fine when he makes it back down to the street. The electronics flash on when he slides into the front seat. But when he jams his finger against the _Start Engine_ button, the engine gives an asmathic little wheeze and—doesn’t start. Theo’s expression goes dry as the desert as he glares sightlessly out into the middle distance beyond his windshield, and then he fishes his phone out of his pocket, and thumbs over to Liam’s name.

Liam answers instantly. “Heeey, Theo,” he says, dragging out all the vowels. The video of the call shakes a little, and the angle’s odd; Liam’s walking somewhere, and holding his phone down by his side. “You left yet?”

“The fuck did you do to my car?” Theo demands instantly.

Liam _grins_. Theo can _visibly_ see him debating whether or not to pretend that he doesn’t know what Theo’s talking about. In the end he suddenly stops walking, and brings the phone up more fully in front of himself. 

“I’ll make you a deal,” he says, in a low, burring tone that’s clearly meant to be an imitation of Theo’s own voice pushed through a filter of Christopher Nolan’s Batman, “you let me come with you, and I’ll give you back—” he pauses, and dips low, and when he comes back up, he’s wiggling a metal object in his free hand, “—whatever-this-is, that I pulled out of your engine.” His grand announcement made, the too-serious expression falls off his face and he frowns down at the object before muttering, “Seriously, what is this thing?”

Theo huffs out an irritated complaint and drops his head back against his seat. He stares up at the roof of his car. In the little square of his phone still alight with the video call, Liam starts humming, off-key and something poppy; something that Theo’s heard dozens of absent times, playing over the radio at Raley’s or the coffee shop or Daniel’s Diner. Theo finds himself smiling, as he listens, the sound filling up the otherwise-emptiness of his car. 

“Fine,” Theo surrenders, before he can think too hard—too _much_ —about it. He drops his head back down to glare in warning at the bright, triumphant grin taking over Liam’s face. “But you better be ready to leave in an hour, _max_ , I need to get on the—”

He stops, partway through his threat, because he’s hearing his own voice twice. Glancing up and around, Theo searches the streets to either side of himself, and then turns his head back forward just in time to catch sight of Liam maybe a hundred or so yards down the street, waving a hand—with the piece of Theo’s engine still clutched within it—and sitting atop what looks like a pile of fully-packed duffel bags. 

Theo’s expression once again goes desert-dry, and he gets the only revenge he can—he hangs up on Liam’s smirking face.

\---

“So where are we headed first?” Liam asks not long after, his bags packed in the back of Theo’s trunk and the piece he’d stolen from Theo’s engine replaced. He’s practically bouncing a little in his seat as he flicks his eyes restlessly over the highway signs they pass; the businesses on the sides of the road; the other cars. Theo laughs a little under his breath, and shakes his head.

“Carson City,” he answers. He keeps his eyes resolutely forward as he says it. Doing so _still_ doesn’t fully hide his smile when Liam twists to stare at him, and then _whoops_.

“God, I haven’t seen Nina and Nathaniel in _forever_ ,” Liam declares, turning back forward and grinning out at the asphalt of the highway disappearing below Theo’s car. He drums his palms frenetically against the glove compartment. He stops mid-drum and turns to squint at Theo. “Is the rest of the pack going to be there?” He can’t quite hide the _hope_ in his voice.

Theo feels his chest twist a little. “Not a vacation,” he reminds Liam, more gently than he’d intended. “Don’t expect a party.”

Liam seems to consider this—his scent falls, and Theo finds his mind blanking a little with surprise that he can _catch_ it—and then Liam shrugs. His scent brightens right back up. “I bet the rest of the pack will be there,” he decides. “Just because _you’re_ no fun anymore…” He adds, smirking directly at Theo.

He says it like a joke but the corners of his upturned mouth are sharp. Theo watches him for a few seconds, and then turns back to the road. He doesn’t reply.

The silence stretches. After a few more long seconds Liam huffs out a breath and slumps back in his seat. He turns back to his window, his head going lax on his neck. Theo lets his eyes follow the way that it exposes the curve of his throat for exactly three total seconds, and then he forces his attention back forward.

Out of the corner of his eye and in the bright sunlight shining in through the windshield, the tattoos on his forearm remain as starkly black as ever.

“Scott was fine with me coming along, in case you were wondering,” Liam suddenly offers, a few minutes later. He’s still facing the window. His voice is dull, almost; affectless. 

Theo wants the humming back. Hell, he’d even take the frenetic drumming.

“I figured he would be,” Theo replies quietly. More than that, really: _is he okay?_ Scott had texted, mere seconds after Liam had returned from calling him on Theo’s orders. 

_You didn’t say_ anything _about calling Scott_ , Liam had argued, after he’d handed back over the part to Theo’s engine and had been practically _vibrating_ with restrained excitement as he’d waited for them to get on the road. _I’m renegotiating our deal_ , Theo had countered, and then had pointed towards the sidewalk. _Now_ call _him_.

Theo had deliberately closed off his hearing while Liam had talked to Scott, but when Scott had texted he’d answered: _I wish I knew_. He’d narrowly resisted the urge to add: _I wish he’d tell me._

Back in the car and on the road, Liam snorts in response to Theo’s reply. “Of course,” he agrees sardonically. “What else would the _true alpha_ ever be?” He lets his head fall back forwards, at least, so that Theo can see his expression without having to search the reflection of his window. “Fine with me coming along with you, fine with me switching my major, fine with me—”

“You switched your major?” Theo interrupts, knee-jerk.

Liam glances at him, eyes unreadable. “Yeah, last semester.”

Theo looks back. “To what?” He finally ventures, feeling oddly like he’s pressing at some kind of bruise; some kind of sore spot that might send Liam to snapping in defense.

Liam looks right back for a few seconds longer, and then shrugs dismissively and turns back forward. “Back to history. Political science just wasn’t _revving my engine_ anymore, you know.”

But Theo doesn’t know. Liam hadn’t told him. He turns back to the road, swallowing past a suddenly cramped throat. “You’re spending too much time with Stiles,” he finally comments. “ _Revving your engine_ , what the fuck.”

“You’re just jealous,” Liam shoots back.

 _Yeah_ , Theo finds himself silently admitting. _I am_.

“You wish,” he says aloud. 

He reaches forward, and turns on the radio, music filling up the car before another of Liam’s sharp replies can. 

\---

“Liam is going to be _insufferable_ after this,” Theo comments under his breath to Nina as he reaches her stood waiting at the front porch of the Carson City pack’s Lake Tahoe lakehouse; Liam had already taken off towards the back, where they could both _immediately_ hear upon stepping out of Theo’s car that there was in fact clearly a party going on. “I hope you realize that.”

Nina just laughs, and folds Theo into a quick, but warm, embrace. “You know Nathaniel,” she answers. “Never misses an excuse to goof off like he’s _not_ a fully-grown adult.” She pushes him gently back by the shoulders and holds him there as she searches his face. “I didn’t know Liam was coming.”

“Neither did I,” Theo replies absently, too quick and too honest. He winces immediately after he’s said it, grimacing apologetically.

Nina gives him a flicker of a sympathetic smile. She squeezes her fingers briefly around his shoulders, and then lets him go. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s get Deaton his book, and then we can go supervise.”

Nina’s study is on the ground floor, with its back wall to the stretch of the house’s backyard, the massive windows overlooking the glimmering expanse of Lake Tahoe just beyond it. Theo stands in front of the glass and looks out as Nina searches the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves built into the wall behind him, but his attention isn’t on the water; Liam had apparently immediately inserted himself into a pick-up lacrosse game already going on, and had already started bobbing and weaving and trash-talking his way through the other players. Theo smiles, slightly, watching.

Nina comes to stand next to him, a deceptively small, deceptively unremarkable book held in her crossed arms. She looks out at Liam, too. “He seems good,” she comments quietly. “Better than he did the last time I saw him, anyway.”

Theo grimaces. “Not hard to do, considering,” he replies, just as quietly. “There wasn’t much of anywhere else togo _but_ up, comparatively.” He turns to face Nina, after, and away from Liam; a signal, and one that he silently prays she’ll let him get away with. “That it?” He asks, nodding at the book.

Nina echoes his nod, and holds out the slim tome. But when Theo goes to reach for it, she pulls it back. Theo looks up at her, brow furrowing.

“Tell me you’re not going anywhere near Oregon on this trip,” she says, near enough to a demand that Theo feels his instincts shiver up and down his spine, his head wanting to bow. 

He resists, and meets her eyes. They’re not red, but they don’t need to be. “On the way back,” he admits. “Yreka. But Shohreh is sending McPherson and a few of her other betas to come escort m—well. Us, now.”

Nina’s expression stays tense. The clench of her jaw stays tight. Theo searches her face.

“You really think Quentin would be that reckless?” He wonders.

Nina sighs, and looks away, out towards the backyard, and the lake, and her pack. “I try never to underestimate Quentin Storo’s capacity for stupidity,” she answers, “or cruelty.” Her voice hardens when she adds the last part. She looks back at Theo as she does.

Theo manages to hold her eyes for a handful of seconds only, and then he has to look away. The heel of his right palm comes up to dig into the tattoos marking his left forearm. “He loved his sister,” he says. In his chest, trapped inside the cage of his ribs, Theo’s own sister’s heart beats, and beats.

He jumps slightly when he feels fingertips on his jaw, and follows their gentle, guiding pressure as Nina encourages his head back around. “We all did,” she counters softly, when she’s seemingly satisfied that she has Theo’s attention again. 

Theo’s expression spasms, and Nina’s mouth twists sympathetically. She sighs again, and offers out the book.

“Just promise me you’ll be careful,” she requests, and this time it _is_ a request. Theo’s head still wants to bow, though not for the same reason.

He reaches for the book instead of letting it. This time, Nina allows him to take it.

\---

He and Liam end up in the water in swim trunks borrowed from various similarly-sized members of the Carson City pack, because Nina is right, and Liam _does_ seem good, and Theo can’t bring himself to say no when Liam practically _tackles_ him on his and Nina’s way out into the backyard to beg to stay a few more hours.

They swim and screw around with the rest of the Carson City pack for the rest of the day, really, the sun getting lower and lower in the sky, and when Nina breaks out the aconite-laced booze Theo doesn’t fight it, just lays back on the shore with a sweating bottle in his hand and _waits_ for Liam to sidle up to him, all attempted casualness, to say: 

“So, hear me out.” 

Theo just hums, his eyes closed and his head tilted up towards the afternoon sun, and keeps his face and body and general demeanor placid; he can feel Liam’s general anxiety spiraling higher in response and has to resist smirking. He must not fully succeed, because Liam makes a scalded-cat noise and digs a foot very pointedly into his side. 

“Hey,” Theo complains, curling up defensively and batting Liam’s prodding toes away.

“So _hear me out_ ,” Liam repeats, reclaiming his foot. He looks down at Theo, very seriously. “I think we should stay here tonight.”

“Is this like a new thing with you?” Theo wonders, stretching out again and crooking an arm behind his head as he squints up at Liam. “The inviting yourself to things bit, I mean.”

Liam fakes an exaggerated laugh, _ha, ha_. “I didn’t _invite myself_. Nathaniel offered.”

“Did he, now,” Theo replies. He knows the answer, though; he’d overheard Nathaniel when Nathaniel had put Liam in a headlock and said _you two should just crash here tonight, leave in the morning_. It’d been a bit garbled, considering Nathaniel had been offering it over the top of Liam’s squawking, but Theo had gotten the gist.

But Liam just says, “ _Yeah_ , he _did_ , and so we should take him up on it. ‘Cause it’d be, you know, rude to refuse,” he tries next. Theo just arches an eyebrow, unmoved. Liam scowls, and then bites his lip, looking out at the water and then back at Theo. “I’ll cover the cost of whatever crap motel room you have to cancel tonight,” he offers, wheedling.

Theo snorts. “With what money, freeloader?”

Liam drops down next to him _specifically_ so that he can dig his elbow into Theo’s sternum. “Ow,” Theo hisses, trying—unsuccessfully—to eel out from under the pressure. “Quit it!”

Liam does not, in fact, quit it. But he does insist, “Say yes and I’ll figure it out!”

Theo finally manages to twist away, sending Liam all but faceplanting onto the shore as he overbalances. Knowing that’s only a temporary reprieve, Theo keeps twisting until his legs are in the way of Liam launching himself back on top of him, which Liam does in fact attempt the second he manages to regain his balance. Theo catches him with a foot on his hip, and a shin across his chest, and holds him at bay. Liam’s bare skin is sun-warm and speckled with sand, and if Theo wasn’t already relaxed from the booze, the feeling of it would be overwhelming; gut-tightening; anxiety-inducing. As it is Theo just glares lazily at him, moving when Liam moves to keep Liam from getting around his blocking legs.

“Theo, c’mon!” Liam complains, half a whine. He wraps his arms around Theo’s legs since he can’t get around them, and rests his chin on top of one of Theo’s knees. “Please?”

Theo knows he’s going to cave before the words ever leave his mouth. He’d _known_ he was going to cave practically since their arrival. He doesn’t know why he’s dragging this out.

 _Yes, you do,_ some part of his mind counters. It’s the same part that’s hyper-aware of the press of Liam’s skin against his own, the dig of Liam’s chin into his kneecap. 

“Fine,” Theo finally agrees, and purposefully shifts his legs to dump Liam sideways. Liam falls with an _oof_. His answering grin is _blinding_.

“I’ll find a way to pay you back,” he promises, breathy from the impact or the sun or his excitement, or whatever. 

Theo just snorts a little, and sits up. He takes another long pull from his aconite-laced beer; it’s gone a little lukewarm in the meantime. “Nothing to pay me back for,” he demurs. “I didn’t have a reservation anywhere.”

Liam frowns, pushing himself into an upright position, and then folding his legs crosswise underneath himself. “What, you were just going to show up somewhere and hope they had rooms? That sounds a little iffy for your compulsively risk-averse ass.”

Theo rolls his eyes. “I wasn’t planning on staying in any hotels, or motels, at all.”

Now Liam is _really_ frowning. “What?”

Theo shrugs, and tilts his head back towards his car parked around the front of the lakehouse. “I fold down the backseat, and I can fit comfortably in my full-shift form.”

He’s done it before, dozens of times—why waste the money if he doesn’t have to?—but there’s still something a little—taken aback, in Liam’s eyes. Theo watches Liam watch him, and it isn’t long before Liam covers up whatever-it-was with a sardonic little smirk.

“What about showering?” He wonders. “Pissing? Or do you—” He shifts like he’s going to lean sideways, and lift a leg, and Theo interrupts before he can complete the movement, expression disgusted.

“No, you freak,” he says. “Believe it or not, our allied packs and hunter clans do have working plumbing.”

Liam considers this, then makes a thoughtful little face and gives a dismissive little shrug, apparently granting the point. Theo expects him to get up, then—he’d gotten what he wanted, they were staying—but Liam doesn’t move. Instead he starts picking at the sand in front of himself, using a single fingernail to pry loose individual stones, and then tossing them carelessly to the side. He keeps his eyes on his fingers, and Theo—is too booze-easy not to let himself take advantage, his gaze on the top of Liam’s downcast head.

“Hey, I’m sorry,” Liam suddenly says; Theo freezes. He’s still stiff when Liam looks up at him, already grimacing. “I know me inviting myself along like, complicated all the logistics or whatever that you’d had planned out for this trip.” 

Theo doesn’t know what to say. The apology’s genuine but he hadn’t expected it; he can’t remember the last time Liam had apologized to him for something. Or for something that _mattered_ , anyway. He swallows, and looks away from Liam, back out at the water; down at his beer. He picks a little at the peeling label. Finally he shrugs.

“Maybe they needed complicating,” he counters, and takes another long pull of his beer, and doesn’t look at Liam as he says it. 

\---

Theo lasts exactly an hour and a half into their drive the next morning, and then he snaps a hand sideways and intercepts Liam’s hand before he can change the radio _again_.

“For the love of god,” Theo orders, exasperated, “just sync your goddamn phone to my car already.”

There’s a calculated look in Liam’s eye that strongly suggests that he’s thinking of arguing, or resisting, just to be a dick. His wrist twists a little in Theo’s grip. But after another few seconds—the highway around them sparse with other cars in the relatively early morning, which is why Theo lets his eyes stay on Liam’s face for longer than he usually would—Liam shrugs, and pulls his trapped hand back, and with the other, he slides his phone free. Theo lets him go. He puts both hands back on the wheel.

Liam spends a minute or so fiddling with his phone. A message pops up on the screen in the center console— _Are you sure you want to sync with Liam’s iPhone?_ —and Theo jabs a finger against it before Liam can. Liam shoots him a smart-mouthed grin like Theo had done it to prove something, and, hell—maybe he had. Theo snorts and props his head up against his left arm braced against the window in the suddenly-expectant silence, waiting to see what Liam will put on. 

It’s not what he expects. The melody is easy, the strains of the guitar soft, and when the lyrics start they’re the sort of slow, contemplative—a little melancholy—that immediately hooks into Theo’s ribcage. He looks askance at Liam, who makes a face back: _what?_ Theo shrugs, trying to drag his thoughts back into some kind of order; they’d jolted like grinding gears when Liam had made his selection, primed for something fast-tempoed and fierce. 

“Jermayne listened to this stuff practically non-stop,” Liam suddenly offers, a little defensive like he thinks he needs to give an explanation. “It was hard _not_ to end up liking it. It was like—auditory hostage-taking.”

“Auditory hostage-taking,” Theo repeats, snorting. “You tell him that to his face?”

Liam gives him a wide, sharp, and _obnoxious_ grin—one that doesn’t go anywhere _near_ his eyes—and says, tongue firmly in his cheek: “I mean, I probably yelled it at him when we were breaking up. That whole night is kind of a blur of yelling and accusations and really ill-advised mid-break-up hook-ups, so.”

Something in Theo’s chest twists. He doesn’t know if it’s because of the thin thread of distress that Liam either doesn’t realize or doesn’t care is winding its way through his scent, or because of the way his mind _immediately_ starts to construct what one of those _ill-advised mid-break-up hook-ups_ may have looked like. He shakes his head, brisk and hard, and forces the whole train wreck of thoughts away.

“Well, it’s a good song,” he finally says; the only thing he can think of that seems safe. He keeps his eyes on the road. “Text me the name of it, will you?”

Liam smirks a little—Theo can see it out of the corner of his eye—but it’s a softer thing; almost a smile. He nods, absently, and starts fiddling around on his phone. 

But now that Liam has brought it up—now that he’s _opened the door_ , as Mason would say, the massive nerd already reading law school textbooks because he’s _Mason_ —Theo can’t help but take advantage. The curiosity _burns_ in his chest, eating away at his resolve like acid. 

“You never really told me what happened,” he points out, softer than he’d intended; hesitant, like he hadn’t meant to be. Liam glances over at him, his brow furrowed slightly. Theo clarifies. “With you and Jermayne, I mean. You brought him home for Thanksgiving and by the New Year we couldn’t even say his _name_ without risking your wrath.”

Liam’s expression spasms. The line of his mouth goes tight, and he jerks his head sideways, towards the window. His pulse pounds at Theo’s ears, suddenly fast. _Sorry_ , Theo thinks, starting to frame the apology in his head. _Sorry, nevermind, I’m just so thrown by your sudden matured taste in music._ Turn it into a joke, a friendly insult. Give Liam something harmless to snap at him for.

But before he can, Liam—speaking it more to his window than Theo—says, “The same thing that happened with Nejla, really. Turns out we weren’t what the other wanted.”

That’s what he _says_ , but what Theo _hears_ is: _I wasn’t what the other wanted._ Theo sneaks a glance at him, but Liam’s still staring out the window. Still, Liam catches his eyes in the reflection; Theo stiffens, and turns quickly back forward. 

He doesn’t do it fast enough to avoid spotting Liam’s sharp smirk, though.

“Nejla,” Theo says, instead of acknowledging it. He pulls up her face in his mind’s eye. “I liked Nejla.” And he _had_. She’d been smart, fierce, with a wicked sense of humor. And she’d always, _always_ , been able to make Liam laugh.

He doesn’t realize how _stupid_ his unthinking commentary had been until Liam snorts and replies, “Yeah, I liked her too. I liked everything about her, but I especially liked that she was a born wolf.” He sighs, and drops the side of his head against his window with a dull _thunk_. “Everything about being a werewolf just seemed to come so _effortlessly_ to her, you know?” He adds quietly, then: “She liked teaching me.”

Theo hesitates, but he wants to _know_. And for the first time in a long time, he thinks Liam might be willing to tell him. “So what happened?” 

Liam shrugs, one-shouldered and careless. “She saw the same thing that everyone else does when they look at me. A _true alpha’s beta_.” The last part is _dripping_ with bitterness, but not nearly as much as when he concludes, “I guess she couldn’t stomach the disappointment after a while.”

“Liam…” Theo breathes, helpless and with his chest suddenly _aching_ with unexpected sympathy. 

But Liam just shakes himself roughly. Literally _shakes_ himself, arms and head and chest juddering and twisting. He tips his head sideways after to squint at Theo, and Theo feels the sympathy in his chest freezing in reflexive, instinctual warning at the thoughtful look on Liam’s face.

“How come _you_ never date anyone?” Liam wonders.

Theo jerks his attention back forward. His fingers around his steering wheel tighten hard enough that the leather creaks in protest. “Beacon Hills isn’t exactly overflowing with options,” he replies offhandedly, trying to dismiss the whole topic.

But Liam won’t let it go. “You travel _all the time_ for the pack. You see more of our allied packs and hunter clans than _Scott_ does. Your options aren’t limited to _Beacon Hills_.”

Theo glances at him. Liam’s expression is harder than he would have expected. Jaw clenching, some, Theo turns back to the road. “What do you want me to say? It just hasn’t really come up.”

“It hasn’t really come up,” Liam challenges, with an edge to his voice, “or you haven’t _let_ it come up?”

Theo doesn’t answer. Liam scoffs, but he at least looks away from staring directly at Theo to glare out his own window.

But: “You know,” he adds, a half minute or so later. “You’re only a pariah because you make yourself one.”

That _stings_. It shouldn’t, but it does. Theo fights back the first, second, and third things that immediately spring to mind to snap back—all too defensive, all too sharp—and counters, “No, I’m a pariah because of what I did. The choices I made.”

“You were _nine_ ,” Liam immediately retorts, whipping back around and _twisting_ this time in his seat to face Theo head-on. “The Dread Doctors—”

“I wasn’t _always_ nine,” Theo interrupts hotly, and it’s _depressing_ how easily they fall back into the same worn grooves of this argument. Theo had really been hoping—naively, clearly—that they’d moved beyond it. “I wasn’t nine in the tunnels with Josh and Tracy—”

“What about the _skinwalker prison_ ,” Liam argues, leaning far enough over the middle console that his seatbelt locks. “Does the time you spent in it just _not count_ for any—”

“Liam,” Theo tries.

“You weren’t always nine, but you’re not _seventeen_ anymore, either!” Liam all but yells. “At some point you have to accept that, or why did you even bother walking _out_ of that room in Shohreh’s house—”

 _Yeah, why did you bother walking out of that room in Shohreh’s house?_ Theo wonders, viciously, to himself. “Liam!” He snaps, instead of letting the thought fester. “Just _stop_ , alright?”

Liam falls silent, but it’s a mutinous silence. Theo exhales out roughly and covers his eyes, just briefly, with his left hand; he’s still driving, after all. When he drops it, he can see the tattoos on his forearm, stark and black and almost _shining_ in the bright sunlight streaming in through the windshield. Theo wishes, suddenly and desperately, that he was wearing a long-sleeve shirt, but there’s a _reason_ that he got rid of all of his long-sleeved shirts. 

There’s a reason he hasn’t _let_ himself buy more.

“Just stop,” he repeats, quiet and almost begging. “Please.”

He can feel Liam staring at the side of his face. He doesn’t look back. 

“Whatever,” Liam finally mutters, and turns back to his window. 

His phone is still hooked up to Theo’s car. It keeps playing its music, but it’s not enough to displace the weight of the silence that settles between them. 

\---

Theo nearly scraps his plans for lunch—he and Liam haven’t spoken a word to each other in hours—but in the end, he can’t do it. 

He exits, and it’s the first time that Liam rouses enough to actually look interested in his surroundings since their fight, his brow furrowing and his expression curious as he straightens up out of his slump. He looks over at Theo.

“What are you doing?” He wonders.

“We need to eat, don’t we?” Theo explains shortly, and leaves it at that. Liam’s mouth tightens, and he doesn’t say anything more.

Theo’s giving away too much, and he knows it. If it was as simple as he’d tried to claim when he snapped at Liam, well. Then he wouldn’t have snapped at Liam, would he? But Theo feels trapped between a rock and a hard place—between Liam beside him, and the sharp, secret, _desperate_ twist in his chest as the squat brick building comes into view—and so he resigns himself to—whatever is about to happen, and slides his car into a parking spot. He releases his seatbelt, and gets out, and doesn’t check to see if Liam is following him.

Liam does, of course. “Oddly specific choice,” he mutters under his breath, half a question, as they make it through the restaurant’s front doors. Theo can feel Liam’s curious eyes on the back of his head.

But if he’d wanted to reply—which he hadn’t—he wouldn’t get the chance.

“Hey, stranger!” Someone suddenly calls, and Theo can’t help it; he _grins_ as a young woman straightens up off the back of one of the restaurant’s booths from where she’d been leaning and casually chatting with a handful of patrons, and starts towards him. “It’s been a while.”

He catches her as she walks right into him, her arms outstretched, and hugs her back just as tightly as she hugs him. “Hey, Lisbeth,” he murmurs, squeezing his eyes briefly shut and turning his face into her hair, the side of her neck, as he breathes in as subtly as possible. 

Lisbeth pulls back, and Theo lets her. She grins at him, so wide that it crinkles up the corners of her eyes, and whacks him lightly in the shoulder with the plastic-backed menu she’s holding. “Where you been?” She demands. “It’s been, what, a few months?”

Theo is _painfully_ aware of Liam staring at him like he’s never seen Theo before. Like Theo is, in fact, the alien that Liam had accused him of acting like at the station a few days ago. Theo ignores him. He keeps right on smiling back at Lisbeth.

“Work, you know,” he demurs. “It’s unpredictable.”

“Mhm,” Lisbeth replies, clearly skeptical. But harmlessly so. She folds the menu against her chest, and jerks her chin at Liam. “And who’s this?”

Theo doesn’t know why the question catches him off-guard. Of _course_ he was going to have to explain Liam’s presence, but seeing her—holding her, even briefly—had knocked all his carefully-prepared plans loose. “He’s a, uh,” Theo starts to say, and then finds himself reflexively hesitating, because _were they_ really, anymore?, “friend from back home.”

Lisbeth’s brow furrows; she’d caught the hesitation. But she lets it go, and looks speculatively at Liam—literally looks him up and down, like she’s studying a line-up or a museum piece she’s thinking about buying—and tilts her head. “Well, _friend from back home_. You got a name?”

Liam looks blindsided, partially by the question but mostly by—as far as Theo can tell—the entire situation. He blinks rapidly a few times, and gives himself another one of those visible, physical shakes. “Liam,” he says, after. “Liam Dunbar.”

There’s a commotion from back in the kitchen. Someone palms the little bell by the serving window multiple times, and glowers pointedly at Lisbeth when she glances back over her shoulder at them. 

“Yes,” Lisbeth yells back, headless of the distance or the amused grin of the patrons between them. “Believe it or not, I _hear you_.” She rolls her eyes, and turns back to Theo and Liam. “I’ve got to go, you know, do my job. But grab a table anywhere, okay?” She looks back at Theo, and her expression softens. “I’ll tell my mom and dad you’re here. They’ll want to come out and say hi.”

“Okay,” Theo agrees, too soft; too gentle. He watches her as she twists on a heel and starts back towards the kitchen, already yelling friendly vitriol at the cook, who’s giving it right back. Closing his eyes, briefly, Theo sucks in a deep breath and then starts towards the back corner of the restaurant, towards a line of booths set against the wall.

But he doesn’t get far.

“Hey,” Liam demands, quiet but fierce. His fingers around Theo’s forearm are tight enough to almost be painful. “What the hell is going on?”

Theo stops, but he can feel the tension running through his own body. There’s no way Liam can’t feel it, too, not with his fingers clamped around Theo’s arm. “Like you said,” he replies, stony. “I travel a lot. I come here when I do. The food’s good.”

He tries to start walking again. This time, Liam’s fingers tighten _past_ the point of pain. “Don’t bullshit me,” he hisses, but he doesn’t sound angry so much as—confused. Concerned. Off-footed. His eyes search Theo’s face, and then flick over Theo’s shoulder towards Lisbeth, now gathering plates off of the serving window and onto her arm. “You know her.” He looks back at Theo. “You _know_ her.”

And then his expression clears, blank with shock, and Theo wishes for a brief, blinding moment that Liam was as much of an idiot as he sometimes acts like, instead of as smart as Theo knows he is, because:

“She’s from one of your families,” Liam realizes, breathing it out soft and slow. He stares at Theo, expression blown-open and a little awed. “Holy shit.”

Theo grimaces, and rips his arm out of Liam’s grasp, and keeps walking.

Liam runs to catch up with him after a few seconds, hissing questions under his breath the whole way to the booth Theo chooses, none of which Theo answers.

Theo slides into one side of the booth and ignores Liam sliding into the opposite, and picks up a menu. It’s a meaningless gesture—he’s got the thing memorized, and as-is his throat is so tight and his stomach is such a roiling mess that it’ll be a miracle if he even manages to choke anything down, let alone _taste_ it—but it lets him put up a barrier, flimsy as it is, between himself and Liam and Liam’s stunned curiosity. 

But Liam is Liam, and instead of taking the silent signal for what it is, he kicks Theo in the shin, _hard_ , under the table. “Theo!”

“Jesus!” Theo swears, jerking and dropping the menu. His shin _throbs_. “What the fuck, Liam?”

But where he’d expected annoyance on Liam’s face, he sees concern. Stark, and raw, and with no attempt to hide it, apparently. Theo feels that _whatever_ in his chest twist around the opposite way. He looks at Liam looking at him for a few seconds, and then he closes his eyes, and exhales roughly, and gives up.

“Yeah,” he admits, voice still reluctant. “She— _they_ —were one of my families.”

Liam searches his face. “When were you with them?”

Theo sighs, again, and glances out the window by their booth. “I was—eleven, or just about.” He’s stretching the truth, a bit; he was eleven. Eleven and seventeen days, to be exact. He remembers the date. He’d done the math. “The Doctors left me with them for about a year and a half.”

Sixteen months and twenty-three days, actually. The Doctors had come to get him just before Lisbeth’s thirteenth birthday party; Theo can remember blinking, and— _waking up_ , just as the first guests had been arriving. Lisbeth’s mom— _Lorilyn_ —had mistaken him for one of Lisbeth’s school friends.

 _No,_ Theo remembers telling her, reflexive; robotic. He’d been in the middle of a _goddamn_ conversation with her seconds before; she’d been asking him to go retrieve one of his sister’s—one of Lisbeth’s—presents from its hiding place in his parents—in _Lorilyn’s_ —room. _No, I’m—_ He hadn’t bothered to finish stammering out an excuse. Lorilyn had gotten distracted as a van had pulled up into the driveway and disgorged another carful of screaming children, and Theo had fled. 

The Doctors had been waiting, invisible to all but Theo, across the street.

“Jesus, Theo,” Liam breathes, over a decade later. “I’m so—”

He doesn’t get a chance to finish, because Lorilyn herself walks up to their table. “Theo!” She greets, wrapping him in a tight hug as Theo scrambles to his feet. “Oh, it’s good to see you.” She tells him, rocking him back and forth a little. She pulls back, and searches his face, her palms cupping his jaw as she peers at him. “We were beginning to worry something had happened to you.”

Theo smiles helplessly at her, and then at Elliot coming up behind her. “No, nothing like that,” he assures her, nodding at Elliot and grinning before looking back at her. “Just busy.”

Lorilyn smiles back and drops her hands away from his face, and then glances at Liam, who—once he seemingly gets over his surprise, his mouth dropped slightly open as he stares up at them—hurries to his feet and sticks out a hand. “Hi,” Lorilyn greets, clearly amused as she shakes Liam’s offered hand. “Lorilyn McGahan.” She jerks a thumb over her shoulder. “This is my husband, Elliot.”

Elliot offers his own hand over Lorilyn’s shoulder. Liam takes it, and stammers, “Liam. I mean, uh. I’m Liam. Nice—nice to meet you.”

He looks so poleaxed that even Theo has to swallow a laugh, the weight in his chest lightening some. A hand curls around his cheek the next second, and Theo glances up, back at Lorilyn. “Well,” she announces, smiling softly at him. “Let’s hear it!” She gestures for her husband and daughter to grab chairs from a nearby table. “What have you been up to?”

They hang around for a while, arranging three chairs in front of the edge of Theo’s and Liam’s booth as Theo and Liam slide back into their seats. Other servers and managers stop by, checking this or that with Lorilyn and Elliot—and every now and then Lisbeth has to get up, and run to the counter to retrieve more plates for her tables—but in between all that, they talk.

“You okay there, Liam?” Lorilyn asks after a while, one eyebrow cocking as she studies him. Theo has to tamp down a _visceral_ reflexive reaction; he knows that eyebrow. Lorilyn used to use it on him and Lisbeth all the time when they’d acted squirrelly. 

Liam blanches, a little. He’d been staring with that same poleaxed expression on his face. Theo had had to resist the urge to kick him, or glare, or do something equally obvious to try and get him to stop. “Sorry,” he says, automatic. Then, a little less robotically: “This is just—” He stops, and gives Theo a searching look, before turning back to the gathered McGahan’s. “How exactly did you get to know Theo?” He wonders, aiming for casual interest and getting, to his credit, at least partway there.

Lisbeth’s the one who answers. She leans over—she’d wedged her chair in next to the edge of Theo’s booth seat—and steals some of Theo’s fries from his plate. “He started coming in,” she hesitates, and glances up at Theo, eyes narrowing thoughtfully, “what, a few years ago? He came around often enough that we got to recognizing him.” She punches him lightly in the arm. “He’s got one of those faces, you know,” she shoots Theo a sly grin, and then tells Liam, “the kind only a mother could love.”

Theo laughs right along with the others, but he can see Lorilyn’s face over the top of Lisbeth’s head, and his heart— _Tara’s_ heart—seizes. He takes another bite of his sandwich to give himself some cover while he pulls himself back together. 

Her dig at Theo accomplished, Lisbeth turns her attention to Liam. “This is the first time he’s shown up with company, though,” she points out, the question clear.

Liam shrugs. “Home on break from college.” He glances at Theo, expression unreadable. “I invited myself along.”

“Well, good,” Lisbeth immediately replies, sounding satisfied. “Theo here needs someone to keep him out of his own head. He seems to get lost in it sometimes.” She reaches out, and roughs up Theo’s hair. Theo squawks, and tries to duck away.

But he freezes, and looks at Liam in surprise when Liam agrees, voice softer than it should be, “Yeah, that’s what I keep trying to tell him.”

At the front of the restaurant, the door opens, and a veritable _crowd_ of people pour through. Almost as a unit, Lisbeth, Lorilyn, and Elliot all make faces. Lisbeth groans, and Lorilyn sighs.

“Duty calls,” she murmurs, and something childish—literally, some eleven year-old piece of Theo shoved deep in the corner of his mind—hopes he isn’t imagining the regret in her voice. She stands, and leans over to press a kiss to the top of Theo’s head. “Don’t wait so long to come back next time, okay?” She requests softly, and when Theo nods—his throat too tight to speak—she smiles at Liam, and then follows her husband and her daughter towards the front of the restaurant, Elliot already greeting their new guests in his booming, warm voice.

Theo watches them go for as long as he dares, and then he drops his elbows onto the table, and covers his face with hands. It lets him avoid looking at Liam, even accidentally, as he concentrates on breathing, and nothing else. Just that. Just breathing.

But: “Theo,” Liam says, very quietly.

Theo squeezes his eyes tightly shut for just a moment, and then he opens them, and smooths out his expression, and drops his forearms to the table. He looks at Liam and then raises his eyebrows, lifts his hands and drops them again in a helpless shrug: _what do you want me to say?_

Liam doesn’t seem to know the answer to that question, either. He just keeps looking, and looking, and _looking_ at Theo, searching his face. His expression is pinched, twisted-up; raw. It bleeds into his scent, which he does nothing to control. 

“I’m so sorry,” he finally breathes.

Theo jerks his gaze away, out of the window. He barely sees the pavement and the tree-line beyond it, his throat tight as he swallows. “It’s fine,” he answers. “It is what it is.” Liam’s scent is making his throat even tighter. He wishes, for once, that Liam _would_ control it. 

Liam makes a small noise. When Theo glances at him, brow furrowing, his lip is between his teeth. Theo stares at him, head tilting in a silent question.

“It’s just,” Liam ventures, clearly hesitant. “It’s just. You _know_ that Scott still has Valack’s novel, right? You could—”

Theo stares at him, horrified. He interrupts, “Are you fucking _kidding_ me?”

Liam recoils. “What, no, I just—”

“Jesus, Liam,” Theo spits, lowering his voice; his earlier outburst had drawn the attention of some of the other patrons, though thankfully Lorilyn and Elliot and Lisbeth are still chatting with the large party that’d come in. “I always knew you could be an asshole, but I never pegged you for _cruel_.”

“ _Cruel_ ,” Liam repeats incredulously, clearly still thrown and unsure what exactly he’d done wrong. “What are you _talking_ about, I—”

“How would you expect something like that to go?” Theo interrupts, voice now low enough that he’s practically hissing it out as he leans further over the table towards Liam, eyes darting around the restaurant to ensure no one’s paying too much attention to them as he says, “You think I should hand them the book, force them to realize how _violated_ they’d been?”

“What?” Liam breathes, now looking flat-out _distressed_. “Theo—”

But Theo isn’t done. “They were dumped with some random kid for over a year, literally _implanted_ with false memories to make them believe they had a son they’d never actually had, and then, when the Doctors were done with them—when they’d _served their purpose_ —they’d had that son taken away from them. How would forcing that knowledge on them be okay? How would that be _fair_ to them?” Theo demands hotly.

“How is it fair to _you?_ ” Liam spits back, his temper kicking in. “You’re the one forced to remember—!”

He cuts off abruptly. He and Theo both jerk to stare in wide-eyed, open-mouthed surprise at Lisbeth, who stands at the end of their table, a condensation-wet water pitcher in her hands. She squints at them.

“Everything okay, here?” She wonders. Her voice is a little flat, and the look she gives Liam isn’t particularly _friendly_.

Theo doesn’t know what to say. He’s still too mired in the absolute _nightmare_ of Liam’s suggestion, his mind already helplessly spooling out the imagined sequence of events. But luckily he doesn’t have to reply.

“Yeah,” Liam manages, a little blankly. He clears his throat, and tries again. “Yeah, I was just.” He stops, and glances at Theo, bottom lip folding between his teeth. “I was just being a bit of an asshole.”

Theo stares at him in surprise. Next to him, Lisbeth’s expression relaxes into a grin; she’d always been quick to anger, but even faster to forgive. She reminds Theo of Liam, in that way. _Or maybe the other way around_ , he realizes with a jolt, seeing them together for the first time; his chest seizes up, a little. Unaware of Theo’s sudden distraction, Lisbeth gives Liam a sly look. 

“Well, no offense, Liam Dunbar,” she opines, the tease clear in her voice, “but you seem like you might be kind of good at that.”

Liam just laughs, though it’s a little choked sounding. He keeps right on looking at Theo. 

He says, “Better than I’d like to be, most days.”

\---

There’s a park across the street from the motel Liam finds for them to stay at that night, his face lit-up by the light from his phone screen in the night-dark car. Theo gets them checked in, and then he leaves Liam there—ignoring the stricken look on Liam’s face, and the way Liam blurts out, “Theo, wait!,” as Theo slams the door shut between them—and makes his way over to it.

There’s a wall-less building at the edge of the grass, the floor of it made of concrete and the space filled with weather-beaten picnic tables. Theo puts his back to one of the brick pillars holding up the roof, and slides down it until he’s sitting. He lets his legs sprawl out carelessly in front of himself. He drops a hand to the grass bordering the concrete, and starts pulling up individual stalks one at a time, methodically shredding them before dropping the pieces, and finding another. 

After a while he stops doing even that, and just drops his head back against the cool brick, and covers his face with his hands—his fingers smelling of wet green earth, and dirt—and just breathes.

When he drops his hands some time later, it’s because he hears footsteps rustling the grass, coming closer. And even if he couldn’t: “Liam,” he says, exhausted and just _spent_ and with Liam’s scent tasting cloyingly thick and somehow unfamiliar in the back of his throat, “I can’t.”

Liam doesn’t stop coming. His hands are buried in his pockets, though he removes them when he goes to sit, splaying his fingers wide on the cool concrete as he lowers himself down against the pillar opposite Theo’s own. He looks at Theo, after. He says, “I’m not here to fight,” quietly.

Theo snorts a little, bitter and bitterly amused. When had intentions ever _mattered_ between them, after all? They fought all the time regardless of whether one or the other had wanted to. Letting that all go, Theo tips his head back on a loose neck and meets Liam’s eyes, waiting. Liam stares back. He pulls his bottom lip between his teeth, and bites down. 

He wonders, “How close did you come to not stopping today? To not,” he clarifies, “going to see them?”

Liam had winced at the start of his second question. Theo doesn’t know why that small movement had stuck out to him the way that it had. A distraction, maybe. Something to concentrate on instead of the dull, still-painful twist in his gut as he answers, “Pretty damn.”

Liam’s expression spasms but he nods and looks away; he’d expected that, clearly. He scrubs his palms across the weave of his jeans covering his thighs. Because his skin is sweaty, Theo wonders? Or just to give himself something to do? Liam stills his restless movements and looks back at him.

“I’m sorry,” he says, enunciating the words clearly, like a proclamation. His expression spasms again, and he exhales out an unsteady breath. When he speaks again his voice isn’t as clear; it shakes a little. “I know all I’ve _done_ this whole trip is apologize, but for what it’s worth, I really mean it.” He stops, and searches Theo’s face. “That—that wasn’t mine to see. I shouldn’t have forced you to choose between letting me, or not getting to see them at all.” 

This time when he bites his lip, he does it hard enough that he bites _through_ it. It heals instantly but the sting of his blood in the air still does something complicated to Theo’s insides. Liam barely seems to notice. He keeps holding Theo’s eyes.

He repeats, “I’m sorry.”

But: “I’m not,” Theo finds himself confessing, before he’s had a chance to think about the words or whether or not he really wants to say them or their consequences. 

Liam _stares_ at him. Theo manages to look back for a grand total of two seconds, and then he has to let his head thunk back, and roll to the side as he looks out over the cool, night-dark stretch of the park beyond. 

“It makes it— _them_ —feel less like some kind of fever dream,” he tries to explain. “Less like some kind of pathetic delusion I dreamed up to—” He cuts himself off. Has to. He swallows, and forces himself to look back at Liam. He shrugs: _what can anyone do?_

Liam had originally let his legs sprawl out, mirroring Theo. Now he pulls them in, planting his feet flat on the concrete so that they’re bent at the knee, and he can drape his elbows loosely atop them. His dangling fingers end up limned in moonlight, oddly still where Theo would have expected nervous movement.

“They seem like good people,” he finally offers, then, more strongly: “I’m glad you. I’m glad _they—_ ” He cuts himself off with a frustrated noise, eyes jerking there-and-away from Theo’s, before he concludes, “I’m glad you had them in your life, even if only for a little while.”

Theo feels his own expression slackening with surprise—his features going raw, and blown open—as he stares. Liam _colors,_ the flush of it obvious. And even if it _wasn’t_ , Theo can sense the sudden heat; can hear the way he shifts, awkward and a little embarrassed by the intensity of his own confession, maybe. Theo bites his lip, suddenly feeling the urge—the _need_ —the give one in kind.

“I didn’t mean to get to know them,” he tells Liam. There’s an _again_ rattling around in his head that he won’t give voice to. 

Across from him, Liam _freezes_ , all his restless movements immediately stopping. His eyes snap to Theo’s, all wide and guileless above the soft _‘O’_ of his mouth. Theo feels his own expression tighten up, brow furrowing and lips pressing hard together, the words piling up behind his teeth; wanting out; wanting to stay in.

“I just wanted to _see_ ,” he manages, but only after he’s cleared his throat—once, twice—and swallowed. “Just once. Just see them. Just know that they were okay.” 

_That they were_ real _,_ he thinks, but doesn’t say. From the way Liam’s expression crumples, he thinks Liam might have heard him anyway. He jerks his gaze away from Liam’s face and forces it out across the empty stretch of the park again, where it’s safer.

He finishes, “But once I _had_ , I—couldn’t stop myself,” soft and helpless; confessional.

There’s a half-minute or so of silence. Theo isn’t looking at Liam’s face so he can’t see what it’s doing, but he can hear Liam’s heartbeat, faster than it usually is. He can smell Liam’s _scent_ , unguarded like it’s been more and more this trip and no longer so cloying. Theo finds himself closing his eyes, and breathing it in deep; holding it in his lungs for as many of his own— _Tara’s_ —heartbeats as he can, before exhaling it back out again.

But finally Liam says, “You talk about it like you committed some kind of _crime_.” His eyes when Theo jerks to meet them are narrow, thoughtful; tight around the corners with some strong emotion. “You talk about it like you’re _still_ committing some kind of crime.”

Theo’s lips quirk without his permission, humorless. “Aren’t I?” He wonders. “They were _victims_ of the Doctors, and I—”

“You were a victim, too,” Liam reminds him before he can say more, interrupting. 

Theo’s jaw snaps shut, and he stares. It’s not the first time Liam’s said those words to him but it might be the first that he’s said them in that _tone_ ; like a statement of fact, not an argument he’s dead-set on winning. Theo feels a response bubble up in his throat—his own lines, long-practiced, about when victims stop being victims and become something else, about the absolute uncaring _entitlement_ he’d felt as he’d buried his claws in Josh’s stomach, and Tracy’s back—but he swallows them down. 

“It doesn’t matter,” he finally dismisses. 

Not callously, just resignedly. It is what it is, and no amount of hand-wringing on Theo’s or anyone else’s part was going to change any of it. And Theo knows— _knows_ , this diamond-hard certainty that lives tucked up against Tara’s heart beating in his chest—that he’s too weak to stop himself from going back; from stealing mouthfuls of Lisbeth’s scent when she hugs him; from hoarding the feeling he gets when Lorilyn presses her lips to his forehead; from letting himself lean into the rock-steady weight of Elliot’s hand around his shoulder. 

“It’s in the past,” he concludes, trying to put words to the thoughts in his own head; trying to gift them to Liam, as best he can.

Except that Liam’s lips just flicker sadly. “Yeah,” he agrees, his eyes hooded but still gleaming in the moon- and streetlight. “Except that’s where you are, too.”

Theo feels his brow furrow. He stares at Liam, thrown. Liam just lifts and then resettles his head against the pillar behind himself, his throat bobbing as _he_ looks out at the night-dark stretch of the park, instead of at Theo, this time. 

“You’re never going to leave that place, are you? You’re never going to let yourself,” he says, soft and a little sad like a realization he’s having for the first time, and one that he hasn’t had time to resign himself to yet. He looks back at Theo, and clarifies, “Your trial.”

It’s not an accusation. Theo still flinches like it’s one. Before he knows what he’s doing he’s curled up, some, his legs coming into his chest and his arms coming around them as he looks away. He doesn’t realize that he’s started digging the heel of his right palm against the tattoos on his left forearm until Liam suddenly reaches forward, and drags his hand away.

But he doesn’t let go. Instead, after a few seconds—after he meets Theo’s eyes, Theo jerking to look at him, wide-eyed and helpless—he shifts around until his right hip is nudging up against Theo’s left, encouraging him sideways. Theo goes, still too off-footed to do anything else, and feels something _tight_ clench in his chest when Liam settles down next to him against the pillar, his shoulder and ribs and hips and thigh against Theo’s own. 

He releases Theo’s right wrist, finally. He wraps his fingers around Theo’s left forearm instead. His palm isn’t large enough to cover up both tattoos, they spill out on either side of his hand, but it doesn’t matter. It might be the _only_ thing that matters, actually. Theo stares at him, stunned beyond words.

Liam just tilts his head back against the pillar, and closes his eyes. After a while, Theo does the same.

\---

Theo’s trial had started like this:

The McCall pack had been hunting Monroe and her escaped followers. They’d gotten reliable word that she was hiding out in the middle of nowhere in Oregon, near a town named Chemult. They’d gathered at the newly-blessed Argent-McCall condo—the McCall house having been too riddled with badly-patched bullet holes in the walls and fixtures to really save—and they’d started to plan.

And Theo? From his place firmly in Argent’s eyeline— _always_ firmly in Argent’s eyeline—Theo had interrupted them, quiet and reluctant and already dreading the consequences, and he’d said, “I can’t go with you to Chemult.”

He’d said, “I go with you to Chemult, and the alpha of the pack there will kill me.”

There’d been a stunned silence. No one had known what to say until something had flickered behind Deaton’s shuttered eyes, and he’d exchanged a look with Argent—whose features had also slackened with surprise—and he’d realized, “Ailene.”

Scott had been the one to ask, “Who’s Ailene?” The rest of the McCall pack had been staring at Theo, who’d _flinched_ —full-bodied and almost violently—at the name. 

“Since its founding generations ago, the Chemult pack,” Deaton had begun to explain, his eyes on Theo’s face, “has been headed by a Storo family alpha. But a few years ago, the presumptive heir was found murdered. Ailene.” Deaton had paused, then. It’d only been a second but it’d felt like a lifetime to Theo. “Her blood had been silver.”

There’d been a rumble of shocked mumbles, _the Dread Doctors, the Dread Doctors, the Dread Doctors_ , but it’d been Argent who’d looked straight at Theo—Theo firmly in Argent’s eyeline—and had said, the question in his voice more a formality than anything else: “Quentin knows it was the Dread Doctors.”

“And he knows that I was the bait,” Theo had replied, and Argent’s jaw—when Theo had forced his eyes up to Argent’s face—had been clenched _tight_.

But it’d been Scott who’d blown out an explosive breath, and who’d concluded, “So you can’t go with us to Chemult.”

So the rest of the McCall pack had gone, and Theo had stayed behind. He’d spent his days working on the hunt with the Sheriff at the station, and at night he went straight to the apartment in Derek’s building that Derek had offered to Scott and Argent to let Theo stay in until they figured out what the hell to do with him, and he’d stood in the middle of the mostly-empty living area and had watched as Derek activated the wards that would keep him locked inside until Derek came to take them down again the next morning.

But sometimes, in the afternoons, Liam would come get him from the station, and they’d go to Daniel’s Diner, or the Preserve, or the high school’s lacrosse field instead. 

_You can’t come with us to Chemult, either,_ Scott had told Liam that day at the McCall house, soft and apologetic but immovable. Theo had been across the room with Argent, listening to Argent as he’d explained in no uncertain terms how Theo would spend his days while the McCall pack was gone—while Theo couldn’t be firmly in Argent’s eyeline—but part of Theo’s attention had been fixed on—part of Theo’s attention had _always_ been fixed on—Liam, and Liam’s wavering scent, and Liam’s pounding heartbeat, and just Liam, himself. 

_Yeah,_ Liam had agreed, resignedly. He’d put his claws through his palms just at the _mention_ of Monroe’s name. When it’d happened Scott had silently retrieved a handful of paper towels, and had handed the wadded-up bunch of them to Liam, and they’d looked at each other, and that’d been it, apparently. Theo had still been able to smell Liam’s blood, soaked into the paper towels tossed carelessly into the trash.

So the rest of the McCall pack had gone, but Liam had stayed behind, too, and sometimes in the afternoons he’d come get Theo from the station and they’d go to Daniel’s Diner, or the Preserve, or to the high school’s lacrosse field.

“I seriously can’t believe how terrible you are at this,” Liam had commented one such afternoon. Theo had rolled his eyes—he’d caught Liam’s throw, hadn’t he?—and had flicked his borrowed lacrosse stick to toss the ball back to Liam.

Liam had snatched it _effortlessly_ out of the air, no matter that Theo’s toss had gone _wide_ , and he’d been grinning and opening his mouth, no doubt about to make another smart-mouthed comment, when his whole expression had blown wide with horror as he’d caught sight of something over Theo’s shoulder. Theo had attempted to turn, adrenaline already _singing_ through his veins, but he hadn’t been able to.

He’d been slammed into, and pinned _hard_ to the ground, five sharp points of _agony_ opening up across his back as someone drove their clawed fingers right through the muscles in between his shoulder blades, on either side of his spine. “Hey, Theo,” Quentin Storo had breathed in his ear, Theo’s head swimming with pain and ringing from its impact with the ground, and then Quentin had yanked him up, and to his feet.

Theo had seen Liam, then: he’d been pinned by two of Quentin’s betas, facedown in the grass and with the betas kneeling on the backs of his thighs, his lower back, their hands jammed against his shoulders, and his wrists, keeping him flat. He’d been struggling and snarling and his eyes had been gold, his mouth full of fangs, but it hadn’t mattered. He’d locked eyes with Theo, and had barely managed to gasp out, “Theo—!”

“I knew I’d smelled you on McCall,” Quentin had hissed in Theo’s ear, ignoring him. 

Theo’s blood had been running warm and thick down his back from where Quentin was still holding him upright with his claws around Theo’s spine, like a marionette without the strings. He’d thought maybe Quentin would rip out his spine right there, right in the middle of Beacon Hills High School’s lacrosse field and with Liam watching, helpless, but instead Quentin had just yanked his claws free, and had spun Theo around, and had tripped him back down so that this time when Theo had hit the ground, he’d hit it on his back. 

Theo had stared up at Quentin and Quentin’s red eyes, then, his lungs full of blood that kept bubbling up his throat and out of his lips, and he’d been sure that he was going to die.

But there’d been an explosion of noise, pounding footsteps and yelling and the cocking of weapons, and the Sheriff and Parrish and Derek had burst onto the field with a handful of armed deputies, and Quentin had hesitated from where’d he’d kneeled over Theo, his clawed hand held poised in the air. Quentin’s red eyes had flickered around the circle of people suddenly surrounding them, and then they’d settled on Deaton, who’d approached much more slowly, and who’d come to stand in between the Sheriff and Derek, his expression unreadable.

No one had moved for several long seconds. No one except Liam, who’d tried to renew his struggles against Quentin’s betas and who had gotten his face shoved _hard_ into the dirt for his trouble; Theo had heard his teeth impact the packed earth, and had jerked reflexively. 

Quentin’s waiting, clawed hand had _flexed_ reflexively in turn.

“Alpha Storo,” Deaton had tried, while Derek had ordered, “Quentin, stop!”

Quentin’s red eyes had flicked to Derek, then. “This isn’t Hale land anymore, Derek,” he’d warned, low and deadly.

Derek had just held his ground, and had replied, “But it _is_ McCall land, and you’re trespassing.”

Beside Derek, Deaton’s eyes had closed, his expression going briefly pained. Still poised above Theo, Quentin’s expression had gone _incandescent_ with rage. 

“Trespassing?” He’d repeated, incredulous and with so much of an alpha burr rumbling through his voice that Theo’s lungs had seized, and he’d choked even harder on the blood filling them up. “ _Trespassing?_ ” 

He’d stood, then, his features half-shifted. The Sheriff had had to throw a hand out to his deputies, warning them not to fire. Theo had just stared up at the sky, trying to breathe.

“You want to talk to me about the _law_ , Hale?” Quentin had demanded, and his shoulders had been _heaving_ with the force of his fury. “Fine, let’s talk about the _Law_.” 

This time, Theo had heard the shift, Quentin’s use of the capital letter—the _Law_ —and he’d closed his eyes. 

“I _invoke_ the Law!” Quentin had snarled above him, and then he’d pointed his still-clawed and still-bloody hand at Theo as he’d said, “I accuse _him_ of being a murderer, and I accuse all of _you_ ,” he’d shouted, throwing his arm out towards the Sheriff and Parrish and Derek and the deputies and Liam still pinned helplessly to the ground, “of _harboring_ him!”

The silence that had fallen would have been near-total if it weren’t for Theo’s helpless, choked inhales, and Liam’s ceaseless struggles, and Quentin’s heaved, half-growled breaths.

And then Deaton had exhaled out quietly, and closed his eyes very briefly, and he’d said, “So be it. The Law has been invoked.”

He’d looked down at Theo, then, who could barely manage to look up at him through his splintering vision, and pain-wracked body, and he’d said:

“Theo Raeken will stand trial.”

\---

Theo wakes up the next morning exhausted. He rolls onto his back at the same time that he brings his palms up to scrub at his cheeks and sleep-swollen eyes, and when he slides his hands back down to rest against his mouth, he looks up and realizes that Liam is sitting in the motel room’s single armchair and watching him silently.

Liam notices Theo’s attention, and doesn’t apologize for his own. “You were dreaming about your trial,” he observes. Theo squints at him, and Liam laughs a little and shifts a bit in his chair, his posture going a little more loose. His lips quirk. “You talk in your sleep.”

 _Great_ , Theo thinks, resigned. He brings his hands up from his mouth to rake back through his hair in a half-hearted stretch, and then leaves them there, elbows bent, as he stares sightlessly up at the ceiling. He debates bringing it up, but in the end he corrects, “Not the trial.” He flicks a look over at Liam. “How it started. Quentin.”

Liam’s expression _spasms_. “Quentin,” he echoes, jaw working like he’s just tasted something _foul_. He clenches it. “I fucking hate that guy.”

Theo snorts a laugh, genuinely amused. “Yeah, well,” he comments dryly. “For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure the feeling is mutual.” With his arms bent like this, Theo can see both the tattoos on his forearm and Liam, side-by-side in his peripheral vision. He drops his arms. He looks back over at Liam.

Liam is back to watching him, brow furrowed. His eyes search Theo’s face, blatant and apparently unashamed by that fact, and then he asks, “Do you want me to drive?”

The _no_ springs immediately to the tip of Theo’s tongue, but. “Yeah,” he says slowly, after a second. He lets his heavy head fall sideways some so that he can look at Liam more directly. “Yeah, actually. You mind?”

Liam shakes his head.

Theo sleeps through the next few hundred miles, half-curled up in the front seat with his head resting against the cool glass of his window. Liam hooks up his phone again when they first get into the car, but he puts back on the same artists or playlist or whatever that he’d played that first day—soft guitar and easy melodies and melancholic lyrics—and he keeps the volume low enough that it forms more of a comforting level of white noise than a distraction. Or it does, anyway, except for the times that Liam forgets himself and starts mumbling the words under his breath, but Theo doesn’t mind; he just hides his small grin against the window, and pretends he doesn’t hear.

He wakes up fully as Liam pulls into some kind of parking lot and they’re immediately surrounded by the raucous chaos of an American highway rest stop in the middle of summer. Sucking in a deep, reflexive breath, Theo straightens up out of his slump and blinks his sleep-sticky eyes as he glances around, frowning slightly.

“Why’d you stop?” He croaks.

“Lunch,” Liam answers easily. “Also, you know,” he waggles an empty can of energy drink and grins. There are several more littered around the center console, crushed to keep them from rolling around. Theo makes a face and shakes his head slightly, and reaches for his door handle.

Liam makes a beeline for the bathrooms when they get inside, while Theo stands at the edge of the cafeteria area and squints at their options. He’s still more than a little groggy, and the number of shrieking children and arguing families hurts his ears. He squints against the pressure, trying to consciously adjust his hearing, which is probably why he misses Liam reappearing until Liam deliberately bumps his shoulder into Theo’s own. Theo stumbles forward a few steps and then twists around to glare at him, though Liam just grins.

“C’mon, Theo-of-the-Dead _,_ ” he says, and hooks his fingers around the inside of Theo’s left elbow to start dragging him towards one of the counters. “Let’s get some food in you before you fall over.” His fingers brush the edge of the Argent fleur-de-lis tattooed on Theo’s left forearm; the magics shiver, and Theo swallows, his thoughts still feeling too sluggish and slow to really do more than stagger along after Liam, anchored around his arm.

They eat, Theo gradually waking up more and more until he’s finally fully with it, responding to Liam’s digs and effortlessly able to dodge it when Liam tries to kick him in the shin in retaliation for some smart comment Theo makes, or when Liam tries to steal one of his egg rolls. He _does_ fill the largest paper cup the convenience store tucked away in the corner of the rest stop has to offer with piping hot—near nuclear, really; Theo can almost _guarantee_ the temperature gauge on the brewer is broken—coffee, though, while Liam stocks up on snacks and candy and— _of course_ —more energy drinks.

It’s while he’s on his way to the register to pay that he sees the little table of hard-backed books, stacked pyramid-style and with a scuffed plastic display stand with a printed advertisement tucked inside declaring the book’s name, and author, and praise. He slows, and then stops, and then picks up a copy in his free hand, brow furrowing.

Liam appears at his side, a cheap pair of sunglasses on his face with the tag still dangling off the nose bridge, the effect giving him a look like he’s got the world’s most absurd nose piercing. He plucks the book from Theo’s hand and turns it over in his own before looking back up at Theo, clearly curious.

“Latest book in a series that I read while I was at Shohreh’s,” Theo explains. “They’re good,” he says, for some reason feeling compelled to keep justifying himself in the face of Liam’s skeptical expression. “Kind of pot-boilers, but Shohreh and I used to try and guess the next plot development, you know. Trade absurd theories.”

He reclaims the book from Liam and then sets it on top of another copy so that he can pick up both it and the one underneath it. Liam’s eyebrows shoot up.

“You’re getting her a copy?” He realizes, incredulous.

Theo hesitates, both book copies and his coffee in hand, and looks at him. The line of Liam’s mouth is too tight for a simple conversation about a gift of a twenty-five dollar hardback book. Theo sighs. “Liam, you’ve got to stop blaming her for what happened. She didn’t have to do what she did. And,” he points out, ducking his head to catch Liam’s eyes again when Liam jerks his gaze away, expression spasming, “she probably saved my life doing it.”

Liam flicks his eyes back to Theo’s. His jaw clenches. “She kept you prisoner for six months.”

Theo gives him a _look_. “That is not—” He sighs again. He thinks: _arguments with Liam—no winning, only stalemates_. He shrugs, and tries a different tack. “Someone had to.”

Liam just _glares_ at him, now. “Yeah,” he argues. “ _We_ could have. Scott or Argent or _Deaton_ or somebody, we could have—”

“No,” Theo interrupts, more patiently than Liam really deserves considering he _knows better_ , “you couldn’t have.” Theo smiles wanly at him, and gestures at Liam to set his ridiculous collection of snacks and drinks on top of the books so that Theo can go buy them. “You were on trial too, remember?”

Liam looks at him, clearly debating whether to keep arguing. Finally he bites off a frustrated noise and dumps his collection of snacks and cans into Theo’s arms, and starts stalking off. Theo just barely manages to reach forward in time with the hand still wrapped around his coffee, and snag the sunglasses off Liam’s face. 

“Do you actually want these?” He asks, holding them up, hooked over his middle finger and pressed against his coffee cup. Liam just flicks a dismissive hand over his shoulder, and keeps stalking away, towards the exit.

Theo watches him go, expression dry, and then he exhales out roughly and goes to check out.

When he gets out of the rest stop with a paper bag of their purchases slung over one of his wrists by the handles, he finds Liam at the edge of the sidewalk leading into the building, leaning against a glass display case held up on metal legs. He’s frowning down at the bas-relief map set inside, his eyes running over and over the ridges and bumps of the charted mountains and streams. He glances up at Theo as Theo comes to stand next to him.

“You ever been?” He wonders, jerking his chin at the map. There’s no sharpness or hint of their previous spat in his tone. 

Theo looks down at the map of the national park spread out below them. “Once,” he answers, and doesn’t elaborate.

Liam doesn’t press him, just shrugs. “I haven’t.”

He shoves off the map after, and straightens, and starts heading towards Theo’s car. Theo doesn’t move to follow right away, just keeps looking after him. 

Theo takes over driving, now that he’s actually awake and fully caffeinated, while Liam—shocking no one—winds up passing out instead in the passenger seat. Theo spends a few seconds watching him at a stoplight, and then, when he gets to the exit that would take them to the interstate they need to take to get back on the road to Boston, he bypasses it completely, and exits onto a local state highway instead. 

Liam wakes up when he pulls off maybe an hour later, apparently disturbed by the bumping and jolting as Theo navigates his way through the dirt-and-gravel parking lot, and to a spot. This time it’s his turn to frown and glance around through sleep-groggy eyes, clearly confused.

“Where are we?” He rasps. But then he must catch sight of the sign declaring the name of the national park, and his head whips around so that he can stare at Theo, eyes wide. 

Theo shrugs, feeling oddly caught-out. “I couldn’t pass up the chance to see you stumble your way through a bunch of wilderness, city boy,” he tries to deflect.

Liam makes a face and fakes a laugh, but his excitement is bleeding into his scent and he sits forward, eyes bright and mouth curving up in a wide smile as he stares out the windshield towards the trail entrance. His eyes flick past the other people and families milling about, and over the trees and patches of tumbled boulders and stretches of field that they can see. He turns and grins at Theo.

“Oh, _hell_ yeah,” he exclaims, and scrambles for his door handle.

Liam picks one of the harder hikes, ignoring Theo’s warning about their complete lack of appropriate footwear or clothing and crowing about how they’d be _fine_ , they were, you know, and here he stops and dangles his index fingers straight down by his mouth. He’s clearly trying to indicate _fangs_ , presumably to silently remind Theo that they were the both of them at least half-werewolf.

Theo just raises his eyebrows. “We’re vampires?” He wonders aloud, solely to be an asshole.

Liam looks confused and then insulted and then he scoffs and lets the whole thing go, and starts off towards the entrance to the trail he’d picked out. Theo snorts a laugh under his breath and follows after him more sedately, but where he’d expected to find annoyance or at least benign irritation in his chest, there—isn’t. 

He shoves the whole mess of it aside, and concentrates on locating Liam through the trees, already a good dozen yards down the trail.

They make good time, no matter that the trail is steep in some places and downright overgrown in others, partially because they are, in fact, each at least half-werewolf, and partially because Theo had had the sense to fill his pockets with trail mix and beef jerky and a bottle of electric blue sports drink that they split between the two of them at various intervals. Liam is like a border collie the whole way through, bouncing around and darting off at various points to go investigate bugs and fallen logs and at one point a very unhappy black snake, who strikes out at him when Liam gets too curious-close. Liam’s reflexes kick in and he falls—literally falls, tripping over his feet and falling flat on his ass—backwards, and Theo snorts and leaves him flailing where he is to brush a foot through the grass, encouraging the snake back and away from the trail.

“Call me a city boy,” Liam warns, when Theo turns back to look at him, “and I’m going to punch you.”

Theo just snorts again, and offers him a hand up.

Intentionally or not, Liam had picked a trail that terminates in a summit. They stand at the top at the little cordoned-off look-out area, and stare around at the stretch of forest and the rolling hills around them, their jackets and hair rustling in the slight breeze. Theo doesn’t fully mean to, but he lets his eyes slip shut and his head tip back as he inhales in a deep breath, and holds it in his lungs—sharp with the scent of fresh earth and running water and blooming greenery—for as long as he can. When he opens his eyes again, Liam is looking at him. 

“What?” Theo wonders, voice soft. They’re the only ones around but it still feels like the proper volume.

He’s expecting Liam to make a smart remark, or give him a sharp grin and a loaded _nothing_ , but instead Liam just shrugs and looks back out at the horizon in front of them. “You like it here,” he observes. 

Theo studies the side of his face. “What, you don’t?”

Liam shakes his head, just slightly. “No, I do,” he disagrees. He looks back up at Theo. “But not in the same way, I don’t think.”

Theo wants to press him. Say: _what way do you think I like it?_ Say: _what way do_ you _like it?_ But before he can figure out how to untangle the words from the solemnity that had settled in his chest, Liam’s lips are quirking, and his gaze sharpens, some, goes a little more playful.

“I bet,” he says slyly, “that some part of you wishes you could run.”

He says _run_ with this specific emphasis, and it takes Theo a second to realize what he means. He gives Liam a dry look, but he can also feel the slightest flush across the tops of his cheeks. “Yeah,” he agrees wryly, “because that’s what we need. A bunch of tourist hikers freaking out about some dopey kid wandering around with a wolf.”

Liam had made a face at _dopey kid_ —clearly correctly interpreting who that would be, in the scenario Theo had laid out—but he doesn’t relent. “Well,” he says. “Good thing you’re a reformed super-spy, then, and you know how to stay out of sight.”

He looks at Theo, eyebrows raised. Theo looks right back, the amusement in his expression fading more and more with each passing second. Finally he bites his lip, and jerks his gaze away from Liam’s. 

But: “You sure?” He double-checks after another few beats, glancing back at him. 

Liam just grins, and nods.

Theo strips, and shifts, in the trees next to the trail, wary of potential hikers. Liam follows him in after he yips, and gathers up his clothes. Theo’s shirt and jeans he tosses over one shoulder, and Theo’s shoes he ties together at the laces and drapes over his other shoulder, Theo’s socks tucked inside. 

“Alright, Lassie,” he says, once he’s got everything settled. “Let’s do this.”

Theo rolls his lupine eyes, and nips Liam’s dangling fingers in rebuke. Liam yelps and makes a grab for him, Theo darting away and out of reach, and then letting his momentum carry him forward as he keeps trotting down the trail. Liam runs to catch up with him.

There aren’t many other hikers on the trail, but Theo still disappears into the trees whenever they _do_ approach. Liam greets them brightly, heedless of the strange looks he gets because of the second set of clothes draped over his shoulders, and grins widely every time Theo reappears at his side. Each time Theo does, Liam drops his fingers to Theo’s ruff and squeezes, just once. 

It’d been afternoon when they’d started hiking and it’s dark by the time they get back to the gravel lot, Theo hovering at the edge of the trees and yipping—and then _growling_ —at Liam when Liam doesn’t stop to come give him back his clothes, just keeps heading towards Theo’s car. Liam stops then, and pivots around on his heel.

“C’mon, you big baby,” he says, and gestures around. “There’s no one else _here_.”

That’s not strictly speaking true, there are other cars still parked in the lot, but they’re all empty, and Theo can’t hear anyone approaching. Still, he stays firmly within the trees and _glares_ at Liam.

Liam just scoffs and then rolls his eyes, and plants his hands on his hips. “Look, there’s a campsite pull-off like a mile down the road, I saw it on the map at the rest stop. Let’s go there, huh? Stay the night in the car.”

No matter that he’s trying to sound firm, he just sounds oddly hopeful. Theo would frown if he had the human facial muscles for it, but as it is he just feels his lupine head cock. But then he remembers telling Liam earlier in the trip: _I fold down the backseat, and I can fit comfortably in my full-shift form._

“I know you’ve got a sleeping bag and mattress pad in the back of your car, you Boy Scout,” Liam wheedles. “C’mon, we save eighty bucks or whatever, and I don’t have to listen to you snoring all night.”

Theo lets out an involuntary little bark—he does not _snore_ —and Liam just smirks, clearly hearing his protest no matter that Theo can’t speak the actual words. He stays where he is, waiting, but he’s also bouncing a little on his toes, his eyes fixed intently on Theo’s face. Theo shifts a little from forepaw to forepaw, thinking. 

After another half-minute or so, he slinks carefully out of the trees, and towards Liam.

Liam’s mouth cracks into a wide, _ecstatic_ grin. “Yeah?” He says. “Really?” He pumps a hand through the air, nearly smacking himself in the face with one of Theo’s dangling shoes. “Yes!”

Liam drives them to the campsite, Theo curled up in the backseat still in his full-shift form. He parks at the very edge of the site, where someone is less likely to be able to glance into the back of Theo’s car and see a _wolf_ asleep inside, and then he fusses at Theo until Theo grumbles and crawls over the center console and into the front seat so that Liam can fold down the backseat. Theo does in fact keep a sleeping bag and mattress pad in his trunk, _just in case_ , and Liam unrolls both and gets them positioned as best he can in the cramped space while Theo watches, amused, his lupine head dropped on top of the center console.

“Yuk it up, fur ball,” Liam grouses, disheveled and slightly out of breath from wrestling with the mattress pad. 

He leaves, after, heading for the squat building at the edge of the site containing bathrooms and a little sitting area filled with concrete picnic tables. When he comes back, he leaves Theo’s trunk’s door raised, and sits on the edge with his legs dangling out, peeling open two of the dried emergency meals that Theo _also_ keeps in his car. He grins at Theo as he finishes separating out all the meat from one, and slides it over towards him.

“Boy Scout,” he repeats, eyes crinkled. Theo just grumbles, and eats the meat that Liam had set aside for him, and then a packet of beef jerky that Liam _also_ opens for him, while Liam sits with his own emergency meal in his lap, his eyes on the dim campsite around them and his legs kicking in the open air. 

They finish eating, and Liam runs their trash over to the building trash containers. When he comes back, Theo picks up a bottle of water gently between his jaws and nudges it against Liam’s side until Liam says, “oh!,” and his eyes widen as he takes it. He cracks it open, and holds it sideways over the edge of the trunk so that Theo can drink. “Sorry.”

Theo just finishes it off, and nudges his wet nose against Liam’s cheek in thanks—Liam’s closest eye squinting shut in response, even as he laughs quietly—and then he turns and pads back further into the car, and drops down next to the sleeping bag and mattress pad that Liam had laid out, curling into a loose spiral. He glances up at Liam when Liam doesn’t immediately follow him.

Liam just looks right back, his expression unreadable in the dim light. Theo briefly considers flaring his eyes to better see it, but then—doesn’t. After another second, Liam tosses the empty water bottle to the side of the trunk, and closes the door, and crawls his way forward to wiggle his way into the sleeping bag. 

Theo had laid down facing away from him—some anxious twist in his gut kicking in—and so he startles when he feels Liam’s hand stroke down his back, the touch a surprise. “Sorry!” Liam immediately apologizes, yanking his hand away. “Sorry, that was dumb, I don’t know what I was—”

But Theo just twists around before he can talk himself out of it—ignoring his shrieking, clanging instincts—and gets his teeth closed gently around Liam’s hovering hand. He tugs, the movement a little awkward, and pulls it back over his back, and lowers it back down. Liam’s fingers spasm against his fur, his eyes wide on Theo’s face. 

“Yeah?” He wonders, so quiet that it’s barely more than a puff of air; a suggestion of sound.

Theo just twists back around so that he’s not facing Liam anymore, and exhales out roughly, shifting back some towards Liam. 

For a long few seconds Liam’s hand on his back doesn’t move, and then it lifts, and slowly starts to stroke. Theo lets his eyes fall shut, and falls asleep just like that. 

\---

Theo had spent the months leading up to his trial like this:

In the immediate aftermath of Quentin’s attack on Theo and Liam at the high school’s lacrosse field, they’d all been at an impasse. Quentin had been unwilling to leave Theo in the custody of Deaton and the Sheriff and Derek and Parrish, no matter the promises they’d tried to make, and they had been equally unwilling to hand Theo over _into_ Quentin’s custody. In the end Deaton had offered up the animal clinic as a neutral location at which they could all wait—Scott and Argent and the others already summoned back, and several of the nearest packs and hunter clans also on their way—until an acceptable compromise could be reached.

Derek had been the one who had carried Theo—his arms slipped under Theo’s ripped-open shoulders, and knees—to his car, and then inside the clinic. Liam had hovered close enough to him in both cases that Derek had actually had to gently chastise him at one point, ordering him softly back. 

Once at the clinic, Theo had expected—through whatever hazy thoughts he could manage to keep together before the pain of the still-jagged alpha wounds in his back splintered them again—Deaton to have Derek take him into the back, to the exam room. But instead Deaton had situated a chair on the clinic side of the mountain ash gate—the mountain ash _barrier_ —and had had Derek set him down, as gently as possible—facing backwards and with Theo’s upper body collapsed against the back—on it. 

Deaton’s reasoning had become obvious when the Sheriff and Derek and Parrish and Liam had joined them on one side of the barrier, while Quentin and his betas had positioned themselves on the other. Deaton hadn’t _activated_ it, but the ability—the threat—had hovered in the air between all of them.

There hadn’t been much that Deaton could do for the wounds on Theo’s back while they’d waited, no matter that he’d carefully cut Theo’s shirt away—and had asked for Liam’s help to do it, clearly _solely_ to keep Liam moving, and occupied—and had bent over Theo’s shredded shoulders, examining the damage. Through bad luck or karma or _whatever_ Theo’s head had been turned towards the waiting area when he’d been set down, and he hadn’t had the energy—or, really, the strength—to turn it, and so he’d had to watch, and watch, and watch the satisfied curl to Quentin’s mouth as Quentin had watched Deaton work in turn.

They’d stayed like that for _hours_.

Scott had been the first to burst through the animal clinic doors. He’d blown through the doors hard enough to warp the hinges—startling Liam, who’d positioned another chair in front of Theo’s and had been doing his fading best to siphon some of Theo’s pain—and he’d tried to gasp out, “Quentin, please—!”

“Alpha McCall,” Quentin had just greeted coolly, and Scott’s jaw had snapped shut.

Argent had followed shortly afterwards. Nina had been next, Nathaniel and another one of her betas following her. Araya Calaveras’ niece had appeared shortly afterwards, deputized by her aunt to act in Araya’s place. She’d arrived almost exactly at the same time as one of the Thurow hunters, the man’s baseball hat pulled low over his eyes and the smile on his face when he’d looked at Theo sharp. 

Shohreh had been last.

“Thank you all for coming,” Deaton had greeted levelly, and then they’d begun.

As much as the discussion had centered on Scott and his pack, neither he nor Liam knew much of anything about the ancient, amorphous mass of treaties and conventions and agreements that made up the combined Law of the packs and the hunters. They’d had to sit, both of them practically vibrating with tension—Liam _literally_ vibrating with it; Theo could feel the tremors through the hand Liam still had laid across his back—while Deaton, and Argent, and Derek did their level best to negotiate on their behalf.

“No one is saying that Raeken shouldn’t stand trial,” Argent had eventually argued. “But we are too close to capturing Tamora Monroe. She _has_ to be our top priority, and a trial would pull too many packs and too many clans away from her pursuit.”

He hadn’t looked at Theo when he’d said it. He hadn’t looked at Theo at _all_ since he’d arrived, really.

“He has to be held,” Nina had agreed. “Held until Monroe is dealt with, and the trial can go forward.”

Scott had opened his mouth to speak, then, no doubt about to offer that Theo could stay with them, exactly like Theo had been doing, but Argent had thrown out a hand, and stopped him. “The Argent clan has a spell,” Argent had offered evenly instead. “A tracking bracelet. We can keep Raeken con—”

But: “Absolutely not,” Quentin had interrupted, practically growling it out; his eyes had flared red. “I don’t _trust you_ ,” he’d continued, glaring straight at Scott and Argent, “not to help him _escape_.” 

His eyes had slid pointedly to Liam, then. Theo’s breath had frozen in his chest, and he’d only been able to let it shudder back out when Derek had moved to block Quentin’s view.

Quentin and Argent had started to argue, then. The hat-wearing Thurow hunter had offered to hold Theo, countered immediately by Nina, whose eyes hadn’t been red but had certainly been a darker burgundy than usual. Araya Calaveras’ niece had sat silently by throughout it all, watching Theo with flat, hunter’s eyes, like she was already looking at him through the scope of a rifle.

In the end, it’d been Shohreh—her voice managing to cut through the raging argument no matter that she’d barely raised it—who’d said, “The Yreka pack will take custody of Mr. Raeken.” She’d paused, in the sudden ringing silence that had fallen, and had looked straight at Quentin. “If that is an acceptable compromise to the Chemult pack?”

Quentin’s jaw had worked, clearly unhappy, but in the end he’d only replied, “On one condition.”

And so Theo had been taken to Shohreh Khorasani’s house, the puncture wounds on his shoulders itching and itching as they’d healed, and he’d stood in the middle of a spacious bedroom, and he’d watched as one by one, five different pack emissaries—including Shohreh’s, and Quentin’s, and Nina’s, and _Deaton_ —had warded him inside. 

Liam had been standing just behind Scott, and Argent, and Quentin, and the other gathered alphas and hunters, his frustration and his helplessness plastered all over his face.

Theo had spent six months locked in that room.

It had had its own attached bathroom—lucky, because the wards stopped any living thing from entering or exiting the room—and wide, spacious windows that caught the light in the morning, and turned the floors and walls gold in the evenings. Theo had gotten to know every inch of that room during his time there, his fingers running over the walls and his eyes over the artwork and his feet over the floorboards. 

He’d spent a lot of time getting to know the ceiling, laying flat on his back in the middle of the room and staring up at it.

Most of Shohreh’s pack had ignored him. Every now and then a curious kid would come peek in at him—Theo, though no one had asked him to, had taken to leaving the door to the room open during the day—only to be hustled quickly away by a parent or sibling or other pack member, their eyes not exactly hard, but not exactly _friendly_ , on Theo’s face. 

But Shohreh—Shohreh hadn’t done the same.

Instead, a few nights after Theo had first arrived—after enough time, Theo had realized later, for Theo to begin to adjust—she’d appeared in the doorway with her usual plate of food, and a stack of books. She’d set both down, and pushed both through the barrier. She’d warned, “That last series ends on something of a cliffhanger, just so you know.”

“Thanks,” Theo had said blankly, too thrown to do anything else. 

He’d read all the books. He’d said, “Thanks for the warning,” when she’d turned out to be right about the cliffhanger ending. He’d laughed, bright and surprised, when Shohreh had given him a sly grin and wondered, “Chances that the author tries to dig themselves out of the hole they’d thrown themselves into with that ending?”

“Even odds,” Theo had replied after a few seconds, just the slightest bit helplessly shy.

Shohreh had brought him more books. He’d pushed the ones he’d already read back through the barrier. And with each stack they exchanged, Shohreh had stayed a little longer, talked with him a bit more. 

And then one night, she’d brought a chess board, too.

“It really is quite impressive,” Shohreh had commented one such night, looking down at the board and the arranged pieces from her place sat on the floor on one side of the barrier. Theo had beaten her soundly again.

Theo had shrugged, uncomfortable. He’d been sitting on the other side with his legs bent and one knee raised, one arm looped around it. “I wouldn’t have been much use to the Doctors if I hadn’t been good at strategy,” he’d dismissed. All of the chimeras had been given unique talents. 

Theo had been given his _brain_.

Shohreh had just looked at him, and her eyes had been softer, really, than Theo had felt he’d deserved. 

But it hadn’t been the last thing he’d confessed. As the weeks had become months, Theo had told Shohreh about Tara, about the first family that the Doctors had stashed him with, and the second. The McGahan’s. He’d told her about the Beast, and what he’d done to the McCall pack, his voice cracking when he’d described plucking Liam’s strings like a marionette to turn him on Scott.

He’d told her about Josh, and Tracy. He’d had to, that night, disappear into the room’s attached bathroom, where he’d spent the rest of the hours until dawn hunched over the toilet getting sick.

“I’m sorry,” Theo had finally apologized weeks after that, his hands covering his face and muffling his voice, after he’d finished telling her about the skinwalker prison, and Liam bringing him back, and the long series of events that had culminated in Quentin finding him on that lacrosse field and invoking the Law. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’ve forced you to listen to all this, it’s not your—”

“Being given the opportunity to get to know someone,” Shohreh had interrupted, firmly for all that her voice had been gentle, “is not a burden, Mr. Raeken.” She’d looked him straight in the eye, and said, “It’s a gift.”

Theo hadn’t known how to respond, and then he hadn’t had the chance. Daniel McPherson, Shohreh’s deputy, had approached, his expression tight. Shohreh had looked up at him.

“They have her,” McPherson had explained. “The McCall pack has captured Monroe.”

\---

Theo leans back against the hood of his car, arms and ankles loosely crossed, and watches as Liam makes his tenth—eleventh?—circuit in front of him. They’re in a tiny parking lot literally attached to the side of their latest interstate highway, and Theo finds himself idly thinking that for a _Scenic Look-Out_ there isn’t much scenery around to look _at_.

That’s not really why he’s spending all his time watching Liam instead, though.

Finally he can’t help himself. “Are you going to be able to handle this?” He demands.

Liam shoots him a dirty look, but doesn’t stop pacing. “I’m fine. I’ll _be_ fine.”

“Convincing,” Theo replies dryly, and raises his eyebrows, undeterred, when Liam turns to glare at him again.

But he stops pacing, at least. “This is bullshit,” he opines. “This is complete and total _bullshit_. You’re doing them a fucking _favor_ , and they’re making you—”

“They’re _hunters_ , Liam,” Theo interrupts, raising his voice to be heard over Liam’s vitriolic commentary. “Hunters inviting us into their _house_. Their _headquarters_.” He tips his head, slightly, and studies Liam. “You’ve gotten too used to dealing with Argent. He’s the _exception_ , not the rule.”

Liam’s mouth curls in a silent snarl, and he jerks his head away, so that he’s not looking at Theo anymore. He stares out at the not particularly-scenic scenery, and then turns back with an equally-jerky movement. “It’s still bullshit,” he insists, jaw hard.

Theo just sighs, and comes off the hood as he straightens up. He can hear engines in the distance, and _powerful_ ones. “Most diplomacy is,” he mutters to Liam under his breath, and keeps his eyes on the entrance to the parking lot as three hulking, dirt-dusted trucks pull in, one after the other.

They park a few spots down, and then there’s a chorus of doors opening and slamming shut again as three, four, five total hunters all hop out of their respective vehicles. None of them are carrying _obvious_ weapons—no slick-barreled rifles, or snub-nosed shotguns—but a handful of their jackets bulge outwards under their arms, and the man who approaches Theo has a belt knife holstered at his waist, its scent _stinging_ at Theo’s nose; liquified wolfsbane in the sheath.

“Mr. Raeken,” the man greets, offering out an arm. His eyes flick to Liam—Liam’s upper lip had curled up slightly at his word choice, _Mr._ Raeken—and he inclines his head respectfully. “Beta Dunbar.”

There’s no way Theo can tell Liam to calm the hell down without being obvious about it, so he gives up on trying to police Liam’s less-than-stellar people skills and clasps the hunter’s offered forearm. “Hunter Leitner.”

The man takes his arm back. “Hamish, please.” His lips quirk slightly. “Hunter Leitner is my grandmother.”

Theo smiles back. It’s forced, but Hamish and his people won’t be able to tell that. The look on _Liam’s_ face, however, remains sour. Theo shifts subtly to the side, and just _happens_ to step on the edge of Liam’s foot.

Liam jolts. “Jesus _fu—_ ” He starts to yelp, but manages to clamp his teeth shut around the actual curse. He swallows, loud enough that Theo can hear it. “Hamish,” he mutters, after a second.

He doesn’t offer his arm.

Luckily Hamish doesn’t force the issue, just quirks another smile and turns back to Theo. “If you’re ready…?”

“Please,” Theo agrees, and waits until Hamish and his people have returned to their trucks to swing around towards the driver’s door of his own car. Liam slams his way into the passenger seat shortly after.

He’s silent as Theo starts the engine and reverses out of his spot, taking up position behind Hamish’s truck and waiting as the other two hunters slide their trucks in behind his car, the four vehicles creating a convoy of sorts. The line established, Hamish pulls back out onto the highway, and Theo follows.

That’s about as long as Liam’s patience lasts. 

“Mr. Raeken,” he repeats harshly. “ _Mr._ Raeken? Is he fucking _serious?_ ”

“Let it go, Liam,” Theo warns quietly. “It was the proper form of address.”

“Bull _shit_ ,” Liam throws back. “You’re a member of Scott’s pack, too, he—”

“ _Not_ in the way you are,” Theo interrupts, shooting him a look. His voice is quieter when he adds, “You know the Law.”

Liam glares back at him for a long few seconds, and then—when he sees that Theo isn’t moved—he scoffs, and looks away, out through his window. “Yeah, well,” he declares. “The Law is bullshit.”

Theo exhales out, rough and frustrated. He flicks his left turn signal and checks his blind spot, changing lanes to keep pace with Hamish. “Is there any part of being a werewolf that you _don’t_ find bullshit, Liam?” He wonders, his exhaustion and his stress—his nose still stinging with the scent of Hamish’s wolfsbane-coated knife—sharpening his words.

But Liam just turns his head back around to look at him, too serious. “Not really, no,” he answers, flat like a statement of fact; not an argument. Theo stares at him, thrown. Liam watches him right back for a few seconds, and then turns his head back towards the window.

After another second, Theo turns his head back forward, too.

They’re silent for the rest of the ride. It’s only about twenty minutes to the Leitner compound but it feels longer to Theo, trapped in his car with a fuming Liam and hemmed in behind and in front by the hunters’ trucks. Closing his eyes as they reach the gates of the property, Theo forces himself to take a deep breath, and _swears_ to himself that when he exhales it back out, he’s going to be exhaling out all the tension between his shoulder blades with it.

It works, sort of.

Hamish leads them inside the main house once they arrive. It looks exactly like it had the last time Theo had been here, down to the artwork on the walls. He finds himself slowing as he passes one of the paintings, his eyes running over the lines and soaking in the colors, same as they always had. He doesn’t realize that Hamish and the others have noticed his preoccupation until he nearly runs into one of the other hunters’ backs, Hamish having stopped their procession.

“Sorry,” Theo apologizes automatically.

Hamish just quirks him another of those small smiles. It doesn’t necessarily touch his eyes. “Good taste,” he notes.

Maybe he’d planned to say something else, Theo will never know. A woman appears in one of the hallways, flanked by two older hunters. Theo swallows. “Hunter Leitner,” he greets, voice quiet, soft; respectful.

“Mr. Raeken, good to see you again,” she returns. “And please,” she adds, “let’s dispense with the formality. You and Beta Dunbar,” she nods to the two hunters flanking her, dismissing them, “are guests here. Call me Yael.”

She looks expectantly at Liam. “Thank you, Yael,” he grinds out. Theo refuses to look at him directly but he’s pretty sure Liam is literally doing it from between clenched teeth. 

Yael’s expression doesn’t change, but Theo’s jaw tightens. He tries to relax it as Yael looks back up at him. “I assume you have Chris’s promised delivery?” She prompts.

Theo nods. “It takes some configuration,” he warns.

Yael hums. “Then we’d better go configure it. Hamish, Beta Dunbar would probably be most comfortable waiting on the back patio while Mr. Raeken works. Would you mind?”

“Of course,” Hamish agrees, and thank _god_ doesn’t try to touch Liam, just gestures out a hand. But Liam doesn’t move, immediately. He’s still staring at Yael, his expression one step up from a flat-out glare. Theo finds himself holding his breath, all the tension that he’d managed to exhale out earlier snapping right back into place between his shoulder blades.

But finally—after a quick, sharp glance at Theo—Liam goes. Theo exhales out his held breath, his eyes slipping helplessly shut. When he opens them again, Yael is watching him.

“We’ll use the library,” Yael tells him. “If you remember the way?”

Theo does.

Configuring Argent’s _delivery_ —access to a new, specially-designed encrypted communication system, the cryptographic key hardcoded onto the keychain token that Theo threads off of his key ring—takes less than fifteen minutes, all told. Yael spends it slowly perusing her library shelves while Theo sits at her desk at her computer and works, but Theo is under no illusions that her attention is on the spines of the books in front of her, and not on him. 

He tries—he _fails_ , but he tries—to drag more of his attention back to her, and away from Liam’s pounding heartbeat a handful of rooms away, flanked by Hamish’s and a handful of others.

Finally he finishes, and sits back. Yael comes to stand next to him, and accepts the token when he offers it to her. “Thank you,” she murmurs. She must notice his preoccupation. She searches his face. “May I ask you something, Mr. Raeken?” She finally wonders.

Something twists _tight_ in Theo’s chest, constricting his— _Tara’s_ —heart. “Of course,” he says, through lips that feel like they’ve gone just slightly numb.

“You’re worried about Beta Dunbar,” she says, and it’s a statement, not actually a question. “About Liam.”

Theo grimaces. “I apologize for his attitude,” he replies, sidestepping it. “He—”

“—is still angry at me and mine for my vote at your trial,” Yael finishes for him. Her tone is matter-of-fact, not insulted.

Still, Theo’s jaw snaps shut. 

Yael just studies him. “That wasn’t a criticism, Mr. Raeken,” she assures him. “You’re fortunate to have such a stalwart defender.”

 _Not when it risks getting him in trouble like this,_ Theo thinks, but doesn’t say. “With his position—” He starts to say instead, and then finds he can’t continue. _Is there any part of being a werewolf that you_ don’t _find bullshit, Liam?_ Theo had asked, and Liam had said, _not really, no._ Theo swallows.

“Maybe it’s his position that’s the problem,” Yael wonders, still in that same speculative tone. Theo stares at her. She looks back for a second, and then hums and looks out, towards the window positioned behind the desk. She says, “It can’t be easy, being the beta of the first true alpha in generations.” 

Theo feels his breath catch, again.

“I imagine,” she concludes, heedless of Theo’s reaction, though there’s no chance she _missed_ it, “that the weight of all those expectations are quite heavy.”

Theo doesn’t know what to say. He can still hear Liam’s heartbeat pounding in his ears. Luckily Yael doesn’t seem to require a response; she drops the arms that she had crossed thoughtfully over her chest, and looks at him.

“Ordinarily the rules of hospitality would require that I invite you and Beta Dunbar to stay for a meal,” she tells him, her tone back to being matter-of-fact, “but I think the kindest thing I could do, given the circumstances, would be to send you on your way as quickly as possible.”

She gestures out an arm towards the library’s exit. 

“Give my thanks to Chris,” she requests. “I’ll have Hamish escort you and Beta Dunbar back out.”

\---

The motel they stay at that night is in a little relic of a once-bustling Rust Belt town, and it features a restaurant with an honest to god pool table tucked into the corner. Of _course_ he and Liam end up playing.

Theo’s not actually that great at pool but he’s _excellent_ at calculating the angles, and he’s in the middle of that—bent over the edge of the table, cue in hand as his eyes flick from ball to ball—when Liam gives an aggrieved sigh. Theo had just attempted his shot; the noise causes his arms to jerk and the cue ball to vacillate wildly across the felt. Still bent over the edge, Theo twists around to glare at him.

“Oh, please,” Liam scoffs, when he notices. “Like you would have made that shot anyway.”

Theo rolls his eyes and straightens up, gesturing mock-benevolently for Liam to take his turn. But Liam doesn’t move. He stays, leaned back against a barstool with his cue planted in between his splayed-out legs, and looks at Theo, his gaze very nearly intense enough to be a glare. Theo stiffens, a little.

“What?” He demands.

Liam bites off another frustrated sound, and jerks his head sideways, so that he’s not meeting Theo’s eyes anymore. “Look,” he snaps back. “Can you just—stop dragging it out, or whatever? The suspense is killing me, here.”

Theo stares at him. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Liam huffs, and sneaks a look back at him. After a second—after he sees that Theo is, unsurprisingly, looking directly at him—he apparently gives up and turns back to face him head-on. “My _attitude_ at the compound today?” He explains, his tone more than a little a sneer. “I heard you talking to _Hunter Leitner_. So just, whatever. Start yelling. Tell me I need to start acting like—”

“—a true alpha’s beta?” Theo fills in, unthinkingly.

And it really is _unthinking_. The second Liam had started in on that last sentence Theo had known where it was going, and he’d remembered: _it can’t be easy, being the beta of the first true alpha in generations_. 

Still, it must not come across that way. Liam _flinches_ , full-bodied and sharp, and then he instantly straightens all the way back up, color on his cheeks and his upper lip curled in the start of a snarl as he glares at Theo. Theo stares back at him, frozen. 

“Yeah,” Liam bites out. “ _That_.”

“Liam,” Theo tries, though he has no idea how to finish that sentence. Liam just ignores him, and shoulders past him towards the other end of the table, where the cue ball had finished spinning after Theo’s last joke of a shot. 

Theo nearly stops him. Nearly tells him, _I didn’t mean it like that_. The problem is, he doesn’t actually know _how_ he meant it. He moves back out of the way to give Liam the room to line up his next shot, though he can’t keep his eyes off the tense line of Liam’s back as Liam leans over the table, the muscles of his shoulders moving under the thin cotton of his shirt.

It’s a UCLA shirt, faded from washings and well on its way to threadbare. Theo’s eyes fix on the university’s crest printed across the chest as Liam straightens up, and feels his eyebrows and lips pulling together in a frown as he studies it. Liam notices the attention and _also_ starts to frown, but Theo beats him to speaking.

“What do you want to do when you graduate?” Theo wonders, his eyes flicking up to Liam’s own.

Now Liam’s _really_ frowning. Some of his defensiveness and his earlier, knee-jerk anger fade, but confusion flows immediately in to take their place. “What do you mean?” He replies. “I have to go back to Beacon Hills, be Scott’s second.”

But Theo can’t let it go. “But is that what you _want_ to do?”

Liam _scoffs_ , harsh and saturated with so much bitterness that Theo instinctively recoils, some. He throws the cue in his hand sideways and down, so that it clatters onto the top of the pool table, knocking the remaining balls every which way. _There goes our game,_ Theo finds himself thinking stupidly, just as Liam snaps, “Since when has what I’ve _wanted_ ever mattered?”

 _That_ causes Theo to freeze. “ _What?_ ” He manages, _staring_. “What are you _talking_ about? Scott’s not going to keep you prisoner if—”

“Why not?” Liam interrupts him, and the smirk that curls his mouth is _mean_. “He seems to have a _talent_ for it, after all.” He flicks his eyes down to Theo’s forearm. He fixes them on the two black circles banded starkly around Theo’s forearm: the McCall pack symbol. 

_Scott’s_ symbol.

Now it’s _Theo_ who feels anger ignite in his chest like a flash-fire. Liam had gone to push back past him, towards their bar-top table and Liam’s beer—useless as the alcohol may have been on him—still a quarter-full, but Theo intercepts him, his fingers closing _hard_ around Liam’s arm. 

“Hey,” he snaps, low and furious and right over the top of Liam’s pained hiss. “That’s not fair.”

Liam had jerked to look up at him when Theo had first grabbed him, but now he jerks his gaze away, jaw working. His muscles under Theo’s clenched-tight fingers flex, and ripple, but he doesn’t try to free his arm. Finally he exhales out roughly, and his entire body seems to _slump._

“I know,” he says, regret thick enough in his voice that Theo can _hear_ it. “I know, I’m sorry.” He goes to step back, his hands coming up to scrub roughly at his face, so Theo releases his arm. After a few seconds of that he drops them again, and squints at Theo. “Why are you suddenly asking me all this, anyway?”

Theo shrugs, the anger in his chest turning inside out under the scrutiny to become a nervous discomfort, instead. He’s getting the sense, too late, that he’d overplayed his hand, here; that he’d revealed something he hadn’t wanted—hadn’t _realized_ —he was revealing. “I guess I just wanted to know,” he finally says, sneaking a look at Liam. “If you wanted to tell me, that is,” he adds, hastily.

Liam’s lips flicker, something like surprise chasing itself over his face. But then he sighs, and looks away. 

“Let’s just clean this up,” he says, apologetic and clapping a hand—and then resting it there, after—against Theo’s chest like he could see or smell or sense the pinch of disappointment Theo feels underneath his palm, “and head back to the motel.” He gives Theo another of those small, heavy smiles as he adds, “Clearly I’m not fit for polite company right now.”

He pushes off Theo’s chest with the hand he’d still had resting on it, and makes his way over to the pool table to start gathering up his pool cue, and the scattered balls. Theo watches the slope of his turned back for a few seconds, and then he swallows past his suddenly-tight throat, and goes to help. 

\---

Theo’s trial had gone like this:

“I don’t even know why we’re still _debating_ this,” Quentin Storo had snarled. “We all know he’s guilty!”

They’d all been in an ancient, weathered, open-floored barn, the walls and roof of which had literally only been standing because of magic. It’d been one of the earliest places that a hunter clan and a werewolf pack had signed a treaty in the continental United States; it’d been protected. At the head of the room, arranged behind a large, straight wooden table, nine people had sat; five hunter clan leaders, and four werewolf alphas. 

Theo—stood in a ring of mountain ash at the side of the room, no matter how pointless the exercise was—had alternated between not looking at Shohreh at the table, and not looking at Liam, crowded in with the rest of the McCall pack at the back of the room with the rest of the various packs’ and hunter clan members watching. 

“It’s not that simple, Alpha Storo,” Shohreh had answered Quentin’s accusation evenly. She’d been sitting just to the right of Araya Calaveras, Araya sat in the center of the table with four werewolf alphas on one side and four hunter clan leaders on the other. “You heard the evidence, same as we all did.”

Quentin had bitten off a furious, sharp-toothed sound. At the back of the room and wedged in between Scott and Derek, his placement there not an accident, Liam’s teeth had started grinding; even having not seen him for six months, Theo had recognized the sound. But Theo hadn’t looked up, when he’d heard it. He’d kept his eyes glued to the floor, midway between his own feet and Quentin’s across from him. 

Several Council members had shifted in their seats, then, and Theo had felt his eyes slip shut, a leaden sort of resignation solidifying in his gut, because he’d known what those unconscious, unthinking little movements had meant; the Council had been exhausted. Theo’s trial had been the last of almost a dozen.

Monroe and her captured followers had gone first; Theo could still hear, if he’d let himself, the echoes of their furious snarls, their protests—their begging, in one or two cases—as they’d been dragged past where Theo himself had been held, waiting. 

He could still hear the ringing finality of the gunshots; he’d flinched every time. Or, at least, every time except one:

Monroe had been loud in her derision. The gunshot that had cut her off had been louder.

But Quentin hadn’t been exhausted. And that, Theo had thought—forcing himself not to look at Liam _again_ —had been why Quentin was going to get what he’d wanted.

“Ah, yes,” Quentin had returned after another long few seconds, his vowels no longer so distended by his fangs. “The _Dread Doctors_.” 

Theo had looked up at him then—he’d had to, surprised—because Quentin had spread his arms wide and executed a dramatic little turn, pivoting to encompass the Council and then Theo and then the watching clan and pack members as he’d argued:

“Well I’ve heard no evidence that Theo Raeken ever tried to _resist_ or _escape_ the Dread Doctors. As far as _we_ know,” he’d added, including everyone in the room in that _we_ thanks to the sweep of his arms, “he—”

But he hadn’t gotten to finish his theory, because someone else had interrupted, yelling, “He _couldn’t_ have escaped!”

Theo’s eyes had snapped to Liam, then; he couldn’t have stopped them if he’d tried. Liam had been on his feet in the rows of benches, Derek’s and Scott’s hands on his arms trying to yank him back down. But Liam had stayed stubbornly standing. “You heard the testimony, the Dread Doctors had the ability to locate any supernatural, _anywhere_ , by frequency. He _couldn’t_ have escaped, he—”

“Alpha McCall,” Araya had said then, just that.

“I apologize, Hunter Calaveras,” Scott had replied desperately, and finally finished _dragging_ Liam back down. He’d pressed his mouth up to Liam’s ear, then, and Theo had just been able to make out the words _you’re not helping_ before he’d had to refocus on Quentin, and the Council, and his _trial_.

“Hunter Calaveras—” Quentin had tried, but Araya had held up a hand. She’d looked straight at Theo, who’d raised his head to meet her eyes.

She’d said, “The last two victims to which you’ve been connected, before your banishment to the skinwalker prison by Kira Yukimura.” Theo had held his breath, because he’d known what was coming. “Josh Diaz and Tracy Stewart.” Theo had flinched at their names, couldn’t help it. “Did the Dread Doctors order you to kill them?”

Araya’s eyes had been hard as flint, steel; crystalline. She’d waited—the entire _room_ had waited—as Theo had swallowed, his throat so dry that it’d _clicked_ , and then had answered, “No.”

The room had broken out in murmurs, then. The look on Quentin’s face had been triumphant. 

Theo would never know what looks may or not have been on the McCall pack’s—on _Liam’s_ —faces. He’d dropped his eyes back to the floor, and had left them there.

Araya Calaveras had banged the rough chunk of stone resting at her right hand on the table several times, then, quieting the room. She’d said, “Alpha Storo. You were the one to invoke the Law and demand this trial. You’ve heard the evidence along with the rest of us, now. What is it,” she asks, “that you desire to be done with Theo Raeken?”

Quentin had drawn himself up. He hadn’t bothered to look at Theo, but Theo could smell—which meant that every other supernatural in the room could, as well—the violent burr of _anticipation_ taking root in his scent. He’d replied, “I respectfully request the Right of Retribution.”

The room had _exploded_ with noise, furious whispers and creaking wood as the watchers in the audience had turned to each other and exclaimed. Theo had just closed his eyes, and as resigned as he’d been—as _unsurprised_ —he’d still had to dig his fingertips into his biceps to stop them from starting to shake. 

But then there’d been an even _louder_ explosion of noise, and Liam had yelled, “No! _No!_ You can’t _do_ this!” 

Theo’s head had snapped up and around to stare at him. Liam’s eyes had been wild, desperate. Derek had literally been holding him back, his arms like steel bands around Liam’s chest; Liam had apparently not only surged to his feet, but had tried to lunge _forward_ , towards Theo and Quentin and the Council.

“He was _nine!_ ” Liam had shouted, so loud and so desperate that his voice had cracked. “He was _nine_ when he was taken, he was—” 

At Argent’s urging, Derek had started dragging Liam away, towards the doors to the barn. He hadn’t been very successful, though, because Liam hadn’t stopped fighting him.

“You goddamn, _fucking_ all-powerful werewolf alphas and hunter clan leaders,” Liam had spat, still struggling against Derek’s hold; there’s been several scandalized murmurs in the crowd. “Where the fuck were _you_ when the Dread Doctors were destroying so many lives? Why didn’t _you_ do anything to prevent the killings?”

Scott had surged to his feet as well, positioning himself in front of Liam as best he’d could as he’d looked towards the table at the head of the room and pleaded, “Hunter Calaveras, Councilmembers, I’m so sorry. _Please_ ,” he’d added, his eyes flicking desperately to Theo’s; there’d been an apology there, too. “I’m sorry.”

Derek had finally managed to wrestle Liam back, and out of the barn. The second the doors had closed behind them, a complete and total silence had fallen; the magics kicking in, sealing out the outside world, and Liam no doubt still furious within it. Theo had stared at the seam of the closed-tight doors, and had wondered, helpless and unbidden, _is that the last time I’m ever going to see him?_

Araya had flicked a hand through the air. Scott’s jaw had snapped shut, along with every other jaw that had been open in the room. She’d motioned for Scott to retake his seat. Deaton, who’d been sitting on Scott’s other side, had dropped a hand onto his shoulder as Scott had complied, and squeezed.

“Alpha Storo,” Araya had announced then, like she hadn’t been interrupted by Liam’s outburst at all, “has requested the Right of Retribution. The Council will vote.”

Six hands hand gone up; four hunter clan leaders, and two werewolf alphas. Sitting with both her hands in her lap, Shohreh had met Theo’s eyes. She’d given him a little nod, and Theo—he’d tried to draw whatever strength from it that he could as _fear_ had burst out from the core of himself—from Tara’s heart—and he could feel himself starting to shake.

 _You knew this would be the outcome,_ Theo had tried to tell himself. _You knew this would—_

But he hadn’t been able to finish his furious self-beratement; someone _else_ had stood, and had started to yell.

“I take responsibility for him!” Scott had announced, his voice cracking, just like Liam’s had. There’d been panic on his face, certainly, but it’d been so blended with _determination_ that the two had practically been inseparable. He’d turned to Deaton next to him, and desperately checked, “I can do that, right? The books on the Law you gave me, they said that I could—”

He’d cut himself off. He’d looked back up at the Council, and repeated:

“I take responsibility for him! For Theo Raeken!”

Theo had been _staring_ at him, too stunned even to breathe. But then _sense_ had reasserted itself, and with it Theo’s own version of all-consuming panic, and he’d burst out, “No!” Scott had looked at him then, wide-eyed and clearly reflexive. “Scott, _no_ ,” Theo had ordered, but he’d known Scott wasn’t going to listen even before Scott’s jaw had gone firm, so he’d turned immediately to Shohreh—whose expression had been blown open with surprise—instead. “Shohreh, _no_. Don’t let him do this. _Please_. You can’t let him—”

But Scott had interrupted, “It’s my right as an alpha, isn’t it? The Law says I can—”

Araya had once again held up a hand, cutting him off. “We know what the Law says, Alpha McCall,” she’d assured him, more than a little dry, “and you are correct in saying that you can take responsibility for him.”

She’d stopped, then, and had searched Scott’s face.

“But it is an _immensely_ dangerous thing to do,” she’d reminded him. “All his crimes, past and future, become yours.”

Scott had just straightened under the attention, and had given her a firm nod. “I understand,” he’d assured her. “And I take responsibility for him.”

Theo had returned to staring at him in desperate, helpless horror. It’d been why he’d seen it when Argent—who’d stayed seated, his expression unreadable, when Scott had originally jumped up—had suddenly sighed, and had climbed to his feet, as well.

“It’s a responsibility that the McCall pack will share with the Argent clan,” Argent had announced, and he’d given Scott the smallest of encouraging, firm nods when Scott had jerked to stare up at him in obvious, raw gratitude.

“So be—” Araya had started to say, after a long pause.

“No!” Quentin had snarled, fully beta-shifted and _emanating_ so much fury that Theo had had to consciously stop himself from taking a step back, out of the mountain ash circle. “ _No!_ I won’t allow—”

“You won’t _allow_ it?” Araya had interrupted, soft and deadly and a warning. Around the room, werewolves and supernaturals and hunters alike had all shifted, the tension in the room snapping taut. 

Quentin had stopped, and swallowed, and when he’d taken a step back to his original place, the shift had been gone from his features, and hands. Araya had stared at him for a few seconds longer, and then she’d turned back to the room.

“Alpha McCall and Hunter Argent have offered to take responsibility for Theo Raeken,” she’d announced. “The Council will vote.” There’d been a pause.

There’d been a pause, and then seven hands had gone up.

\---

Theo is three-quarters asleep against the passenger seat window of his car when Liam comes back out of the coffee shop with two drinks in a carrier and a white paper bag balanced on top of them. One of the drinks is some overdone monstrosity of an iced, blended coffee drink, so Theo assumes it’s for Liam right up until the point where Liam slides back into the driver’s seat, plucks it from the carrier, and holds it out to him.

Theo doesn’t take it.

Liam rolls his eyes, and offers it out more insistently. “Shut up and drink it, dude,” he orders irritably. “You clearly need the sugar.”

And the problem is, Liam—isn’t exactly wrong, so after another reluctant second, Theo reaches forward and accepts it. He takes a sip as he watches Liam free the other, _completely normal_ paper cup from the carrier and take a long drink, but he isn’t happy about it. Liam notices his glower, and just gives him a _look_.

He also starts the car, and gets them reversed out of the spot he’d chosen earlier and headed back towards the highway. He pulls the ridiculous sunglasses Theo had in fact bought him at the rest stop corner shop from the collar of his shirt, and puts them on, and then braces his elbow against the window and leans his head against his palm. Theo’s still _exhausted_ , sugar-filled coffee drink or no, and so he lets his head tip back against the passenger side window, and his eyes slip shut.

But: “Hey,” Liam says, smacking him lightly in the chest with the back of one hand. “ _Drink that_ before your metabolism gets all fucked up and you turn into a chimera-gremlin.”

Theo rolls his eyes but Liam’s right—if he doesn’t get _something_ in his system, he’s going to be in for an extremely rough day. Propping his drink up on the armrest built into the door so that he can reach the straw with his lips without moving, he starts sucking down mouthfuls of the oversugared blend, though he does it more than a little sulkily.

Liam glances over at him and snorts, but he also laughs, low and under his breath and genuinely amused; the sound warms Theo’s chest, some, gone a little cold from the iced coffee. But the smile falls off Liam’s face fast, and his laughter peters out quickly. Theo twists his head around to look at him.

Liam notices the attention, but instead of pretending he doesn’t know why Theo’s looking at him, surprisingly, he just flicks his eyes over Theo’s face, searching it. He touches his tongue to his bottom lip. “Do you usually dream about it this much? Your trial?”

Theo’s first, immediate instinct is to lie. The _yes_ is on the tip of his tongue, and it’d be absolutely believable, but. “No,” he admits, and grimaces apologetically.

Liam snorts again, but this time the sound is _bitter_. “I can see why you’ve spent so much time avoiding me over the past few years, then,” he comments. Theo _flinches_.

“Liam,” he tries, but Liam flicks his free hand through the air, a clear dismissal.

A clear: _leave it_.

Grimacing again, Theo glances away from Liam and back out of the windshield. He also straightens up, some—the brief shot of adrenaline that he’d instantly felt at Liam’s question waking him up. His drink is still half-full so he takes a long pull of it; an attempted consolation prize. 

From the look in Liam’s eye when he glances over, he knows exactly what Theo’s doing, but his lips still flicker.

Theo hides his own grin, and settles a little more into his seat. One of the highway signs passing them by catches his attention as he does, and reminds him. He rolls his head to look over at Liam in the driver’s seat.

“You know, you’ve—seemed kind of reluctant, ever since I told you who we were going to see next. I thought you liked the Fahrners.” He pauses, something occurring to him. “Don’t you go to school with one of their daughters?”

“Cassidy,” Liam fills in. “And yeah, I do.”

Theo waits, but Liam doesn’t continue. “So? I thought you two were friends.”

Liam huffs out an aggrieved noise, but shrugs the shoulder attached to the hand he’s using to steer the car one-handed. His fingers creak around the leather of the steering wheel. “We _are_ friends. Or we were, anyway.”

He pauses, and shoots a glance at Theo before turning back to the road.

“She’s good friends with Jermayne, too,” he explains, and leaves it at that.

Theo doesn’t need him to continue. He can fill in the blanks himself. “Ah. And Jermayne won her in the break-up.”

Liam smirks, but it’s humorless. “Something like that,” he agrees.

There’s silence in the car, after that. Theo’s awake enough now—Liam had been right about the sugar, the asshole—to be hungry, so he reaches for and starts investigating the white paper bag Liam had also brought back from the coffee shop. There are two danishes and a cranberry bagel inside. Theo feels something in his chest clench as he looks at the latter, and feels his lips quirk softly as he reaches inside, and breaks off a piece.

He’s just shoved it into his mouth when Liam suddenly says, “He got a job offer. Jermayne,” he clarifies, when Theo looks over at him, one of his cheeks bulged out with his bite of bagel. Liam smirks at the sight, but then sobers as he continues, “A really _good_ job offer, for after college. That’s why we broke up.”

Theo takes another sip of his drink primarily so that he can chew, and swallow, his mouthful of bagel faster, and he can repeat, “You—broke up because he got a job offer.” He doesn’t bother to hide his confusion, or his skepticism, from his tone.

Liam just rolls his eyes. “We _broke up_ ,” he replies, sounding a little aggrieved, “because he wanted me to go _with_ him, when he took it.”

Liam clearly thinks he’s given Theo all the information he needs to properly understand what Liam’s telling him, but Theo isn’t following. He squints at the side of Liam’s face. “So? Isn’t that—usually a good thing? Someone wanting to stay together after graduation?”

Liam twists to stare at him, incredulous. Theo lets him for a full second, and then gestures meaningfully back out at the road. Liam makes a face, but turns back. 

“ _So_ ,” he drawls, “the job is in _Sarasota, Florida_.” He pauses and glances at Theo again, and when he sees that Theo’s done nothing in response but raise his eyebrows, he adds pointedly, “Which is on _the other side of the country_ from Beacon Hills.”

Theo cocks his head, still not seeing the issue. “ _So?_ ”

But that’s apparently it; the limit of Liam’s patience for Theo’s seeming obtuseness. “Theo, come _on_ ,” he snaps. “I can’t leave Beacon Hills.”

Theo feels his own temper flare in response. “What are you _talking_ about?” He throws back, equally sharp. “ _Lydia_ left. _Stiles_ left. And _they’re_ still part of—”

“ _They’re_ ,” Liam interrupts, raising his voice to drown out Theo’s, “not Scott’s first beta, are they?” 

He glares at Theo when he’s done. Theo’s jaw snaps shut. Liam’s lips flicker into a smirk that’s all angles, and no curve.

“Come on, Theo,” he says, and now he just sounds _tired_. “You know better than _anyone_ , really,” he argues, and his eyes flicker down to Theo’s left forearm; to his tattoos, “that that shit? The politics, and the traditions, and the culture? That shit _matters_.”

He looks away, after he’s done, back out of the windshield, and towards the road. He brings both hands up to the steering wheel, and tightens them hard enough around the leather that it groans a complaint. Theo watches him; can feel how soft, and raw his expression is as he does.

“Scott would find a way,” he murmurs, after a long few seconds. “If you asked him, he’d find a way.” He meets Liam’s eyes when Liam glances over at him. “You know he would.”

Liam just exhales out, rough and low and under his breath. “Yeah, well,” he mutters, his expression spasming and the muscles of his shoulders clenching. He turns back to the road. “Maybe it shouldn’t all be on Scott, anymore.” His fingers tighten again; the leather groans. “Maybe someone else should have to make some sacrifices, sometimes.”

He stabs a finger at the console, after that. Theo’s car picks up Liam’s phone in response, the two still synced, and music starts pouring out of the speakers. Liam turns it up just enough that conversation would be difficult, though not high enough to hurt either of their supernaturally-enhanced ears. 

And really, even if he hadn’t, Theo thinks, resisting the urge to dig the heel of his right palm into the Argent fleur-de-lis, and the McCall stacked circles, tattooed on his forearm. Even if he hadn’t, there’s just—not a lot that Theo can say to that.

So he turns his face towards his window, and says nothing. 

\---

Theo’s trial had ended like this:

Theo had been escorted back to the holding area—an outbuilding as ancient as the barn, and just as heavily magicked—and warded back inside by the same five emissaries, Deaton included, who’d warded him into the room in Shohreh’s house. 

Deaton’s eyes on Theo’s face had been appraising when he’d finished. Theo hadn’t even pretended to understand what that look had meant.

But he’d also stayed standing in the outbuilding’s doorway as Deaton had gone to join the other emissaries in preparation for the ritual that Scott had invoked, and the Council had accepted. He’d stayed standing there, rather than retreating to the narrow bench on the outbuilding’s back wall, because he’d spotted Scott making his way over.

Theo had managed to restrain himself for just long enough to let Scott get into range, and then he’d hissed, “What the hell were you _thinking?_ ”

Scott had just smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling up, and had said, too-honest, “It’s good to see you. I tried to stop by before your trial actually started, but Argent and Deaton said that it would—” He’d cut himself off, but Theo hadn’t needed him to continue. That sentence had ended: _Argent and Deaton said that it would make things worse._

It had seemed so trite as to almost be funny, then, in comparison to how much worse Scott had ended up making things _during_ Theo’s trial.

“Scott,” Theo had said, unable to pretend to respond to the pleasantries. “This is a mistake. You have to take it back. You can’t do this.”

“I can, actually,” Scott had just replied, and while his voice had been easy enough it’d also been steel-lined. “You want me to show you? I’ve got the book in my car—I highlighted the provision.” He’d stopped, then, and had looked thoughtful. “I also dog-eared the page.” He’d winced. “Deaton’s not going to be happy about that.”

His easy demeanor had been for Theo. It’d been a gift he’d been trying to give, but it’d run straight into the ever-thickening walls of Theo’s panic; the balled-up, diamond-hard _rock_ of certainty in his chest that just kept insisting: _he can’t do this._

“ _Scott_ ,” Theo had repeated, and he’d been _pleading_. “You’re a _true alpha_. The first true alpha in _generations_. Do you know what that _means?_ Do you understand the opportunities you have?” Scott’s expression hadn’t changed. Theo had nearly snapped his teeth in frustration. “They’ll _listen_ to you. You can _change things_. All the bullshit you dislike about all this, the way things are, you could _change them_ , but not if you risk it all on—”

But Scott had just interrupted. He’d just said: “This _is_ me changing them.”

Theo’s jaw had snapped shut. Scott had smiled, soft and a little sad.

“You’re not the same person who went into the skinwalker prison, Theo,” he’d murmured. “You’re not even the same person who came _out_ of it.” He’d stopped, and had searched Theo’s face. Theo had wished he’d known what his face had even been _doing_. “I want to see who you can become, given the opportunity.”

His smile had become a little less soft, a little less sad.

He’d said, “I can give you that opportunity.”

He’d stopped then, and had looked up and around. There’d been movement back by the barn; Argent, flanked by Araya and Shohreh and a handful of the other councilmembers, had gestured. Scott had turned back to Theo, and had given him one final, firm nod. 

Theo had watched him walk away then, still speechless.

The layout of the barn had been reconfigured when he’d been escorted back inside. The large wooden table had still been there, with the nine members of the Council still sat behind it, but it had no longer been the centerpiece. Instead, a much smaller, much more unassuming table had been placed in the center of the room. A metal bowl had been set on top of it.

The mixture inside the bowl had been so dark, and so viscous, that it’d seemed to absorb all the light that had hit it.

Theo had been placed one side of the table, Scott and Argent on the others. Shohreh’s emissary had taken up the final side, and then—under the combined weight of the eyes of the packs, and the hunter clans, the back of the barn once more filled—the woman had taken Argent’s hand, and had held it over the bowl, and had cut a shallow slice across his palm. 

Argent hadn’t flinched, then or when the woman had pulled his captured hand down, submerging it in the night-dark mixture in the bowl.

The woman had gestured for Theo’s arm then, and he’d given it to her. His left, unthinking; his non-dominant hand. She’d taken it, and had lifted Argent’s dripping hand out of the bowl, and had pressed Argent’s palm to Theo’s skin. Argent had wrapped his fingers obediently around Theo’s arm, and Theo had hissed and his knees had nearly buckled as his arm began to _burn_. 

When the woman had pulled Argent’s hand away, there’d been a fleur-de-lis marking the inside of Theo’s elbow, stark even under the rivulets of blood-and-ink mixture still running down his arm. Theo had stared at it, barely breathing.

And then, not long after, he’d stared straight at Scott, Scott staring right back at him, as the woman had wrapped Scott’s dripping fingers lower around Theo’s forearm, underneath the Argent fleur-de-lis. Theo hadn’t flinched that time. He hadn’t looked down at the stacked circles of the McCall pack left behind around his forearm when Scott had taken his hand away; he hadn’t needed to. 

He’d just kept looking at Scott.

His trial had ended soon after that; almost anticlimactically so. The packs and clans had began to break up, splintering back into their individual groups, and Theo had held up one finger when Scott had gestured at him, and gone to see the Yreka pack—to see _Shohreh_ —one last time. He hadn’t expected to be pulled into Shohreh’s arms when he’d finally come to a stop in front of her, but he hadn’t fought it, either; he’d closed his eyes, and had buried his face in her shoulder—his newly-tattooed left arm still throbbing slightly as he’d wrapped it around her in turn—and had held on.

And then he’d stepped back, and had nodded at Shohreh when she’d nodded at him, and he’d turned to go find the McCall pack. To go _join_ the McCall pack.

But halfway across the room, he’d been intercepted.

Quentin’s hand around his arm had been tight enough to risk snapping the bone underneath. It hadn’t been an accident that he’d grabbed Theo’s left, his palm and fingers deliberately _sawing_ at the sensitive skin of Theo’s newly-tattooed flesh as he’d squeezed. He’d spoken fast, and right up against Theo’s ear, aware of the multiple sets of eyes—supernatural and hunter alike—that had snapped immediately to them.

He’d hissed, “You’re going to fuck this up, Raeken. You’re not going to be able to help yourself. And when you do,” he’d assured Theo, tightening his hand _past_ the point of pain, so that Theo had had to grit his teeth, and lean in closer to try and relieve it, “I’m not just going to demand retribution from you.”

His eyes had flicked towards the McCall pack. To Scott, being held at bay by Argent’s hand on his shoulder, and to Liam, Derek’s arm already looped preemptively around his neck.

“I’m going to demand retribution from _them_ , now, too,” Quentin had promised, dark and heavy and like an _oath_.

Quentin had let Theo go, then. He’d walked away, his pack falling in behind him, but Theo hadn’t been able to move. He’d just stayed right where Quentin had left him, an uneasiness that had been threatening to become _dread_ churning in his stomach as he’d stared after him.

And then it hadn’t mattered; the McCall pack had come to _him_. They’d enveloped him, briefly blocking out the rest of the barn and the packs and the hunter clans, and they’d said _you okay?_ , and _ready to go?_ , and _let’s get the hell out of here_.

But it’d been Liam who’d bumped his shoulder into Theo’s own on the way to the cars—Theo a little light-headed with the fact that he was just allowed to _leave_ , to walk away; to walk wherever—and had grinned when Theo had jerked to look over at him. He’d said, “I’m glad you’re coming home.” Just that, and then he’d flushed some—Theo had caught the barest glimpse of color on his cheeks in the moonlight outside the barn—and had gone to catch up with Corey, and Mason, a few steps ahead.

And Theo had smiled, helpless, something warm igniting in his chest as he’d watched the back of Liam’s retreating head. But as he’d been yanking open the door to Scott’s Jeep, and preparing to climb inside, he’d turned just enough to catch sight of Quentin, leaned back against his own car and watching with red eyes. 

The warmth in his chest had gone cold. He’d spent the rest of the ride back to Beacon Hills trying to breathe around it, and even the helpless giddiness that had started to bubble between his ribs, up and out of his throat as he’d grinned, and grinned, and grinned at Scott and Malia and Liam who kept turning to grin at him, hadn’t been able to melt it.

He’d glanced down at the tattoos on his forearm, and then he’d lifted his right hand, and brought it over until he could dig the heel of his palm against the stark black marks.

\---

He spends literal _hours_ debating it—he’d woken up before his alarm, and had been unable to go back to sleep for _this exact reason_ —but in the end Theo corners Liam in their motel room’s tiny bathroom, his hands on either side of the jamb to block the doorway, and he tells him, “I think you should stay here today.”

Liam’s eyebrows shoot _way_ up. “Excuse me?” 

He’d been in the middle of towel-drying his ridiculous hair; he freezes mid-swipe of the towel over his head and _stares_. The visual makes him hard to take seriously, but.

“I think,” Theo repeats, voice steady and implacable, but with his fingers tightening around the ridges of the door jamb hard enough that the wood creaks a protest, “that you should stay here today.”

Liam just looks at him for a long few seconds, and then he enunciates, very clearly, “No,” and goes back to scrubbing the towel roughly over his head.

“Liam,” Theo complains, but Liam just starts humming one of the songs he’d been playing nearly on repeat in the car, loudly and mostly off-tune. Theo glares at nothing for a moment, and then reaches forward and yanks the towel away from him. “I’m serious,” he insists, holding the towel farther away when Liam makes an aggrieved sound and tries to steal it back.

Liam stops trying to reclaim his own towel, and with a _very_ deliberate amount of eye-contact, picks up Theo’s discarded towel from the counter instead. Theo rolls his eyes as Liam starts to rub it over his hair.

“How about,” Liam requests as he does so, “you start by telling me _why_ you think I should stay here, and then I’ll have all the information I need when I once again tell you _no_ after.” He gives Theo a winning smile. Theo glowers back, unamused.

But.

He blows out a rough breath. He explains, voice terse, and tight: “This hunter clan is old-school. Very _we hunt those that hunt us_ , except that they tend to have a very _expansive_ definition of the phrase. More of a _we hunt those that_ might _hunt us_ kind of approach to the lifestyle.” He’s still holding Liam’s towel, he realizes. He balls it up, and throws it onto the corner of the bathroom counter as he adds, “Think Gerard, not Chris.” 

Liam pauses at that, the expression on his face tightening in a way that suggests he’s taking Theo seriously, finally. His eyes flick over Theo’s face, studying it.

“And you thought,” he replies after a moment, his hands moving to loop Theo’s towel around his neck so that he’s holding it at either end, “that telling me that would make it _more_ likely that I’d let you go see them by yourself?” His tone is incredulous. He’s looking at Theo like Theo’s some kind of idiot.

Theo groans. “Liam—”

“ _No_ ,” Liam just interrupts, deliberately speaking over him. “Absolutely _not_. Jesus, Theo,” he adds, now sounding a little insulted. “How could you have _possibly_ thought I was going to agree to that?”

 _I didn’t think it was possible,_ Theo thinks nonsensically, _I just knew I had to get you to agree anyway._ But he’s clearly fucked that up, even if he’d had anything like a shot in the first place; the line of Liam’s mouth is as mulish as Theo’s ever seen it. Theo exhales out a harsh, uneven breath. He scrubs his hands roughly over his face, and then drops them.

“Then you have to promise me you’ll be careful,” he tells Liam instead, and then, when Liam starts to make a face: “I’m _serious_ , Liam. Every single toe _entirely_ in line. The Gauthiers aren’t like the Leitners. They aren’t going to find your obvious disdain for their way of life charming.”

Liam bites off a frustrated sound, and jerks his head sideways so that he’s not looking at Theo anymore. Theo watches his jaw work for the seconds that it takes Liam to suck in a deep breath, and _whoosh_ it back out, and then turn back to Theo with a firm nod. Theo just raises both eyebrows right back, unconvinced.

“Jesus, _fine,_ ” Liam snaps. “I _promise_ I’ll be careful. I’ll be on my best goddamn behavior, not a toe out of line.” He stops, and glares at Theo. “Satisfied?” 

Theo’s not, but. He nods, reluctantly.

Liam must catch his hesitation. His jaw clenches again. “Why is Argent even giving the Gauthiers access to his new communications system if they’re such a bunch of backwards assholes?” He demands.

Theo meets his eyes. “You know that phrase,” he prompts, “‘keep your friends close, and your enemies closer?’” 

Liam’s expression slackens a bit with surprise, and then tightens right back as he fully absorbs the implications. Some of the anger drains from his face, and his shoulders lose some of the tension they’d acquired. His fingers spasm around the ends of Theo’s towel, still slung around his neck. 

“I’ll be careful,” he repeats, more quietly—more sincerely—this time. “I promise.”

And this time, Theo believes him. 

But as they’re being escorted—Theo’s car once more wedged in the middle of a rolling convoy of vehicles—onto the grounds of the Gauthiers massive stretch of property, Theo feels his earlier uneasiness start to creep its way right back into his veins, his limbs. He searches around the parts of the property he can see, and then swears under his breath.

“Something’s wrong,” he explains, before Liam can ask. His fingers tighten around the wheel. “Half the cars are missing that are usually here, _including_ Gaven’s.” Theo bites off another curse. 

Ordinarily, Theo thinks, Liam would seize on the opportunity to rib Theo for what he might consider to be an overreaction; Theo getting too far inside his own head, paranoid. But this time he just clenches his jaw, his eyes intent on Theo’s face, and quietly asks, “So what do we do?”

Theo just looks at him. “Nothing.” He blows out a tense breath. “What we came here to do.” His eyes search Liam’s face. “Liam…”

“I’ll be careful,” Liam promises again, soft.

Theo keeps looking at him for as long as he dares, and then he gives him a short, sharp nod, and turns his attention back to the road, and the cars—and the _hunters_ —in front of him. 

But part of his senses stay anchored—part of his senses _always_ stay anchored—to Liam beside him.

The hunters who’d come to escort them lead them to a dirt parking area set in between several of the property’s barns and other buildings—the Gauthiers running a fully functional farm, in addition to their _other activities_ —and the main house. Theo parks where instructed, and shuts off the engine. Neither he nor Liam move, initially. 

“Well, shit,” Liam finally mutters, and glances at Theo. “Only way out is through.” 

He gets out, slamming his door shut behind himself. Theo follows.

“Raeken!” Chandler Gauthier greets as he jogs down off the main house’s porch where he’d been waiting, lounged back in a deep-seated chair. His voice is friendly but his gaze is sharp, and it sharpens further when he spots Liam. “My father didn’t mention you were bringing a friend.” 

His eyes flick over Liam’s face as he comes to a stop in front of Theo and Liam, the rest of the hunters forming a semi-circle of sorts around them as they flow in around either side of Theo’s car. Intentionally or not—and Theo has his theories—it leaves him and Liam half-trapped with the hunters on either side, Theo’s car behind them, and Chandler in front of them. Theo forces himself not to tense, but out of the corner of his eye he can see Liam’s fingers spasm where they’re hanging at Liam’s sides.

“It’s Beta Dunbar, right?” Chandler continues, smiling a smile that doesn’t go anywhere near his eyes. He offers out a forearm. “I don’t think we’ve had the pleasure.”

Liam takes it, after only a split-second of hesitation. “Glad we’re finally correcting that oversight, then,” he replies, and even manages to _sound_ as normal, and as friendly, as Chandler himself. “Hunter Gauthier,” he adds.

Chandler’s lips flicker, the first _real_ sign of amusement Theo’s seen from him since their arrival, and even _that’s_ a loaded thing. But he takes his forearm back without further comment when Liam releases it, and turns to Theo.

“So, Raeken,” he says. Beside Theo, Liam twitches at the casual address—and the casual disrespect it implies—but thankfully doesn’t otherwise respond. “As you’ve probably realized,” he lifts his arms, and gestures around, “my father isn’t here right now. But I’ll happily take delivery of Argent’s...whatever-it-is.” 

He holds out a hand expectantly, a sharp little smirk on his face.

Theo plasters on as convincing a smile as he can manage. “I appreciate the offer, but unfortunately that won’t work. Turning over the token is one thing. Configuring access to the system is individual-specific.” 

Chandler’s smirk sharpens further. Liam shifts his weight, consciously or not, and around them, several of the hunters roll their shoulders, crack their necks. Theo shoves down his rising instincts—and the shift attempting to rise with them—and just keeps smiling blandly back.

“Is that right,” Chandler replies, after a too-long beat. It’s not a question. He pretends to look thoughtfully at Theo, head tilting, and then grins. “So make me the individual, then,” he suggests.

Theo holds his ground, and just forces his smile to stay on his face, though his cheeks are beginning to ache a bit with the effort. “Would that I could,” he says, as easily as he can, considering, “but those aren’t my instructions.”

Chandler’s deceptively friendly expression doesn’t change. His shoulders and arms and body don’t suddenly betray any tension; his eyes just flick over Theo’s face, his lips flickering in another of those sharply amused smirks.

And then all at once, he _moves_.

Theo’s back hits the side of his car _hard_ , winding him. His head cracks against the glass of the back window, and he starts to jerk reflexively back forward before stopping himself with a jolt. Chandler presses the blade of his now-unsheathed belt knife—the blade _reeking_ of liquified wolfsbane—harder to Theo’s throat. 

“You know,” he observes lightly, and right over the top of Theo throwing out a hand and sharply ordering _Liam, don’t!_ , as Liam starts to jerk reflexively forward, “I don’t know that Argent’s _instructions_ should count for much.”

He stops, and searches Theo’s face again—Theo’s head tilted back at an awkward, high angle thanks to Chandler’s knife at his throat—and then he reaches down with his free hand, and gets a hold of Theo’s left arm. Of Theo’s left _forearm_ ,to be specific; of the inside of Theo’s left elbow. He drags it up, so it’s hovering in the air between them, and on display for his hunter friends and for Liam, still stood vibrating with useless tension off to the side. 

“Not after _this_ ,” Chandler hisses, squeezing his fingers even harder around Theo’s arm and putting the Argent fleur-de-lis tattooed there on even starker display. “ _This_ is a betrayal of everything we—”

But he cuts off; he has to. He glances up and around as the air fills with the sound of roaring engines, and then his eyes widen and _panic_ flashes across his face. But before Chandler has the time to fully react, several massive trucks are pulling into the parking area. A handful of the hunters who’d escorted Theo and Liam onto the property have to jump back, or sideways, to make room. 

“Dad,” Chandler starts to stammer as the door to the lead truck blows open, and Gaven Gauthier jumps down, his face already one big thundercloud. 

Chandler also starts to step back from Theo—taking his knife with him as he goes—but apparently not fast enough for Gaven’s tastes. He gets his fingers wound in the back of Chandler’s shirt, and practically _throws_ him backwards, away from Theo. Chandler barely manages to regain his footing without falling over. Gaven glares at him, and then at the other hunters standing around shuffling their feet and determinedly not meeting his eyes. _They’re all younger_ , Theo realizes, and that reality is only underlined when a handful of other hunters, all _older_ , appear from the other trucks that had pulled in with Gaven.

“Dad, I was just—” Chandler tries.

But Gaven just interrupts. “I will deal,” he tells his son, and seemingly the younger hunters gathered around, “with all of you later.” 

He then switches his gaze to Theo, still leaned up against his car, trying desperately to calm his raging adrenal gland and trying just as desperately _not_ to touch the stinging skin of his throat—and to Liam, who’d rushed to Theo’s side the second Gaven had thrown Chandler off of him. He grimaces.

“Beta Dunbar, Mr. Raeken,” he says. “I apologize for my son, and his friends.” He inhales in a deep, steadying breath, and lets it back out just as smoothly. It’s the same kind of breath that Theo has seen Argent take when he’s lining up a shot. Cleansing, steadying; _dangerous_. “I meant to be here when you arrived.”

“Then where the hell were you?” Liam spits. One of his hands is on Theo’s arm—Theo’s left, intentionally or not, right above Theo’s tattoos—and his other is on Theo’s chin, trying to tilt it up—and ignoring Theo’s attempts to resist his doing so—so that he can look at Theo’s throat.

“Liam,” Theo hisses, chastising, but Gaven just waves a dismissive hand through the air.

“Something came up,” Gaven answers, “and we had a limited window to seize the opportunity offered.” 

He uses the hand he’d already had lifted to gesture back towards his truck, and the others that had pulled in behind it, his fingers crooking in a clear signal. Theo stares at where he’d indicated, and even Liam stops screwing around with Theo’s unmarked neck to twist around and stare, too.

It’s why they both see it when one of the older hunters reaches into the backseat of one of the trucks, and drags out a young man. The man hits the ground on unsteady legs and immediately collapses, barely managing to catch himself on his zip-tied together hands, his head lolling on his neck. _He’s drugged,_ Theo realizes, eyes narrowing and suspicion _blooming_ in his chest as he straightens up off his car, finally, his gaze fixed on the man’s face.

And then the man looks up, and straight at him, and Theo sees his wide, gold-flared eyes. 

\---

“You can’t do this,” Liam says. Theo snaps a hand out across his chest to prevent him from being able to force his way any further forward as he does so.

Gaven just gives Liam a hard look from his position sat behind his desk. “I assure you I can.”

“Okay, well, then you _shouldn’t_ do this,” Liam insists. He pushes against Theo’s restraining arm against his chest, but not hard enough to actually force the issue. The movement is unconscious, Theo bets, helpless like the way Liam’s entire _body_ is vibrating with restrained tension.

Gaven leans further back in his chair, his eyes still fixed on Liam’s face. “He crippled a hunter.”

“ _You_ were the one who said he didn’t mean to,” Liam explodes, and since he can’t move forward—Theo’s arm still banded across his chest, he moves a few jerky steps back. “He was _newly bitten_. He didn’t know what the hell he was doing.”

Stood a few feet away from them in Gaven’s spacious office with his arms crossed and his stance balanced, practiced— _hunter-wide_ —Chandler scoffs. “I’m sure that’s of great comfort to the man whose spine he severed.”

“You said,” Theo interrupts, before Liam can respond; Liam’s upper lip still curls over teeth that are threatening to become sharp, regardless, “that the rogue alpha who bit him has already been—dealt with.” The words taste sour in his mouth, and behind him Liam lets out a sub-vocal growl that Gaven and Chandler _probably_ can’t hear. “What about one of the local packs? If _they_ take him—”

“They won’t,” Gaven interrupts. He switches his gaze from Liam to Theo, and Theo honestly can’t tell if the sympathy there is real or an affectation. He has to stop himself from gritting his teeth either way. “I already asked. They refused.”

“What?” Liam bursts out, sounding more _baffled_ than pissed off, though Theo’s sure he’ll get there. “Why the hell would they—?”

Gaven sighs, and the sympathy on his face, in his eyes—real or feigned—twists a little; becomes wary as he refocuses on Liam. “They didn’t say,” he answers Liam’s question. “But,” he adds, his voice carefully neutral, and his words clearly as _equally_ carefully picked, “if I had to guess, I’d assume their hesitation has to do with packs’ general reluctance to take in members with—known histories of violence against hunters.”

It takes Liam a second to fully realize what he means, but when he does: “Shocking,” he spits back, “that they would be afraid of _retaliation_ , given our warm reception earlier.”

Gaven’s expression tightens with displeasure. Chandler _sneers_. Theo—his instincts already _howling_ and his muscles already so soaked with adrenaline that he’s surprised he’s still _standing_ —twists around to get a hand in Liam’s collar, and yank him forward. Liam stumbles into him, but his split-second surprise melts off his face to be replaced with _fury_ almost instantly. Their faces are very close. 

Theo looks right back at him, and orders, low and under his breath. “ _Stop_. This is _not_ helping.”

He shoves him back a step without waiting for Liam’s answer, but when he twists back around to face Gaven, he does it by positioning his body as best he can in between Liam, and Chandler on one side and Gaven in front of them. Liam stays where he is, surprisingly, close enough that Theo can feel his heat, and the skate of Liam’s furious breaths over the back of his neck.

“Hunter Gauthier,” Theo starts, forcing a level of calm into his voice that he in no way feels. “ _Please_. One of the California packs will take him. I _know_ they will. Shohreh, or Nina. I just need a few hours to talk to them, work out a plan for getting the omega to them.”

Gaven’s tight expression eases some, his eyes narrowing as he looks appraisingly at Theo. He starts to open his mouth, but his son beats him to speaking.

“ _Why_ are we even still talking about this?” He demands, practically glaring at his father; Gaven’s expression tightens right back up. “We did what the Law required. We offered the local packs a chance to take him in, and they refused. We are not _obligated_ to keep trying to find a _no-kill_ shelter for—”

“A no-kill shelter?” Liam repeats, too incredulous to be furious yet, but Theo spins around and _catches_ him when he lunges forward in the next instant, his face and scent and racing heartbeat now all practically _incandescent_ with rage. “A no-kill—!”

“ _Liam_ ,” Theo hisses, digging his heels in and _shoving_ Liam back a step. “ _Stop._ ”

“He _crippled_ a _hunter!_ ” Chandler snarls back. “That _can’t_ be allowed to go unanswered!”

“Enough!” Gaven yells, surging to his feet and slamming his hands down on his desk. 

Chandler jerks back with a startled look, the aggression that had filled his frame leaking immediately out of him like a pricked balloon. Under Theo’s hands, Liam also freezes, though his shoulders stay rigid with tension. His eyes flick up to meet Theo’s, reflexive, and Theo catches the gold flaking the otherwise-blue of his irises and tries to put as much determination, and reassurance, in his own eyes as he can. _Trust me_ , he mouths. _Let me handle this. Trust me._

He turns around without waiting for Liam to respond. Part of it is practical, the skin between his shoulder blades prickling uncomfortably with his back turned to both Gaven and Chandler, but part of it isn’t; Theo just isn’t sure he could handle seeing Liam’s reaction to his request, whatever it might be. He takes a deep breath, and steels himself.

“Hunter Gauthier,” he repeats, as calmly as he can. “Your son is right, and you’ve done everything the Law requires. I _know_ you’re not obligated to show the omega any more mercy than you already have.” Theo can hear Liam’s quiet scoff at _mercy_ ; he ignores it. “But I am asking— _we_ are asking—you and your clan to show a little more. Please.”

Gaven’s expression shifts. Theo can sense the negotiations coming; the bartering. He tries to start cataloguing what he might be able to offer; he and Scott and Argent had spent a night before he’d left strategizing for something like this—though not _exactly_ like this, Theo hadn’t anticipated needing to bargain for someone’s _life_ , _christ_ —and he pulls up those potential boons. But he doesn’t get the chance.

“He needs a pack,” Liam interjects suddenly. “If he has a pack, this whole debate is moot, right?” 

Theo twists around to look at him. Gaven and Chandler are doing the same. Liam just holds his ground, and continues right on staring steadily at Gaven.

Gaven eyes are narrow, but eventually he replies, voice carefully even, “In essence.”

Theo feels something tight clench in his chest, intuition starting to climb its way up his spine. He stares at Liam, but Liam isn’t—won’t—look at him. Instead he keeps looking right back at Gaven, and he says:

“Great. Then the McCall pack offers him a place.”

Gaven’s expression blanks a little with surprise. Theo feels his own slacken. But Liam’s stays resolute. 

“Beta Dunbar—” Gaven starts to say.

“Nice try, _Beta_ Dunbar,” Chandler winds up talking over his father, sneering. “But I don’t see McCall _around_ anywhere, so—”

“I’m Scott’s second, _Hunter Gauthier,_ ” Liam interrupts, meeting Chandler glare for glare. “You want me to cite chapter and verse of the Law? You know I have the authority.”

He switches his gaze from Chandler to Gaven. He still won’t look at Theo. 

“The McCall pack,” he repeats, almost overenunciating every word with how clearly he’s making sure to say them, “offers him a place.”

Gaven’s jaw works. He doesn’t speak right away. He does, when his son goes to open his mouth—presumably to protest—snap up a hand, clearly warning Chandler to stop. He keeps looking right back at Liam.

“The omega would have to accept,” he finally points out.

“Great,” Liam replies, without missing a beat. “Let’s get him in here and ask him, then.”

\---

“I can be there in six hours,” Derek offers, his line crackling with feedback. It might be Theo’s connection, though; christ knows he’d deliberately driven himself and Liam and the young man—Alec—out into the middle of nowhere. “Seven, if the traffic’s bad.”

“Okay,” Scott agrees, and his exhaustion manages to come through even with the shitty call quality. “Okay, great. Thanks.” Then he seems to realize: “Theo, is that actually—?”

“It’s fine,” Theo answers, cutting him off. He has no desire to be forced into answering the question _is that actually okay,_ because he’s not sure if he’d have to lie in order to respond _yes_. Cutting Scott’s question off at the pass doesn’t actually change much, but it feels like enough. “I’ll send you the coordinates,” he assures Derek.

Alec’s where Theo had left him, when Theo gets back to the campsite; curled up in the back of Theo’s car in Theo’s sleeping bag, the backseat folded down to make room for the mattress pad. He’s surrounded by a veritable little forest of protein bar wrappers and emergency ration containers and at least three empty bottles of sports drink. Theo had thought about warning him to slow down, when Alec had originally started tearing into the food Theo had offered him, but then he’d stopped himself; Alec had had so much of his autonomy stripped from him in the last week that Theo hadn’t been able to bear taking anymore, not even with the best of intentions. 

Anyway, Alec thankfully hadn’t ended up making himself sick, and then he’d passed right the hell out when he’d finished. It’d been a gift horse, and one whose teeth Theo hadn’t even been willing to _glance_ at.

But Alec isn’t his only problem. Theo closes his eyes from where he’d paused by the back window of his car to look in at Alec, and stretches out his hearing. It doesn’t take him long to find what he’s looking for, and then he starts walking.

The campsite is almost deserted, thankfully, the location more out of the way than most and it still being the middle of the week. Probably it’d fill up with weekend warriors once the workweek ended, but Theo and Liam and Alec would be long gone by then. 

But they weren’t long gone _yet_ , and Theo finds Liam on the shore of the small river bordering the edge of the campsite. He’s got a pile of flat-bottomed rocks at his feet, and as Theo watches, Liam leans down and picks one up, weighing in it in his palm for a few seconds before flicking it out, over the water. It skips once, twice, three times, and sinks. Liam doesn’t reach for another.

“Alec finally fell asleep,” he states, flat like he was reciting facts out of a book, or off a label; bloodless and uninterested. But Theo can hear his heartbeat, can smell his scent, even under the lazy blanket of the humid air and the sharp bite of greenery and wet, and knows he’s neither of those things.

“I know,” Theo tells him, instead of pointing that out. He leans against the railing of the dock poking out into the water, his hands in his pockets. “I saw.”

Liam glances over his shoulder at him, expression unreadable. “Sorry about your car’s interior.”

Theo forces himself to shrug, instead of grimace. He doesn’t actually give a shit about the gauged-up state of the backseat cushions, or the holes punched through the passenger side door handle. But his head and chest and instincts are still a tangled-up mess from the drive from the Gauthiers’ property, and it’s hard to think straight. It’d _been_ hard to think straight; that’s why he’d been so useless while Liam’s righteous fury in the front seat had set off Alec still terrified and too new to control the shift in the back, the sight and smell and _feel_ of which had set off Liam even further in the front, which had driven Alec’s mounting anxiety even higher… 

The vicious circle of it had only stopped when Theo had pulled into the campsite, and Liam had practically _thrown_ himself out of the car. He hadn’t come near Alec since.

“That’s what the manufacturer’s warranty is for,” Theo replies, belatedly.

Liam snorts, but his next skipped rock only manages one bounce before crashing into the water. Theo catches his sharply bitten-off breath. 

“Liam,” he tries, but Liam cuts him off.

“I don’t know how you do it,” he confesses, and skips another rock. This one does a little better, though Theo’s willing to attribute that to the sheer _force_ Liam had used to throw it, and not technique; he can spot it wobbling in the air. “You _or_ Scott. Dealing with this kind of shit, every day.” 

He stops, and pivots around so that he’s facing Theo head-on. His gaze is shrewd.

“You were getting ready to bargain for Alec’s life, weren’t you?” He asks. Theo stiffens, some, and Liam laughs, though there’s no humor in the sound. “I was trying to figure out what that weird little dance you and Gaven were doing had to do with anything, but that’s what it was. You were going to _trade him_ for Alec’s life, like Alec was some kind of farm animal. Literal,” he says, and his voice bubbles with mirth that _still_ doesn’t have any real mirth in it, “literal horse-trading.”

Theo winces. “Liam,” he tries again.

“I don’t blame you,” Liam interrupts, cutting him off. He turns back to his little pile of flat-bottomed rocks, and picks one up. “That’s just the world we live in, right? The only card you had to play.” He throws his rock.

It doesn’t even _skip_ , just crashes into the water.

And there’s not a whole lot Theo can say to that—Liam’s _right_ , after all, as cynical as his interpretation is—and so Theo says the only thing he can think of. He says, his voice _aching_ a little with sincerity: “You did good today.”

He’s not sure what he’s expecting. At best, maybe that Liam’s still-pounding heartbeat slows, some; his scent loses some of its bitter edge. At worst, maybe that Liam gives another of those awful, humorless snorts and ignores it, or dismisses it. What he isn’t expecting is for Liam’s pounding heartbeat to start pounding _faster_ , and his scent to take on a _hot_ edge, in addition to the bitter, as he whips around.

“Good?” He repeats incredulously, his expression screwed up, and more than a little raw. “ _Good?_ I just,” he gestures out an arm, jerking it wide, and—back towards the campsite, and Alec within it, “ _determined_ the rest of some stranger’s _life_ for him.”

Theo stares at him, brow furrowing. He counters, “You _saved_ his life.”

Liam just shakes his head, the already-tight line of his mouth tightening further. “I just shackled him to California, to a place he’s never been and a bunch of people he’s never met.”

There’s something hot flaring in Theo’s _own_ chest, connected as if by thin, unbreakable thread to the rising edge of _distress_ in Liam’s scent. He straightens up off the railing. He takes a step towards Liam, hands out of his pockets, now. 

He points out, “I’m pretty sure he’d prefer being in Beacon Hills to being _dead_.”

But Liam just yells, “That’s the _point_. _God_ ,” he swears, wheeling away, his hands rising to rake so roughly back through his hair that Theo’s _sure_ it has to be painful. “He never should have been forced to _make_ that choice!”

He spins the rest of the way back around so that he’s facing Theo again, and his eyes _fix_ on Theo’s face, searching it.

“Don’t you,” he starts, his voice cracking with his frustration, or his exhaustion, or his—whatever. “Don’t you see how _fucked-up_ this all is?”

 _Yes_ , Theo thinks; underneath his awareness of Liam is his awareness of Alec, deeply asleep for probably the first time in days and no longer apparently starving, also probably for the first time in days. _No,_ he thinks next, helpless and almost immediately; the magics in the tattoos on his arm prickle.

 _I don’t know,_ he thinks, his eyes as fixed on Liam’s as Liam’s are on his.

“How is it fair,” Liam continues, right over the top of Theo’s conflicted silence, “that those bastards got to make that decision? How is it _okay_ that Alec got sentenced to death for being in the wrong place, at the wrong time? He didn’t mean to hurt anybody!” Liam insists, and gestures sharply again. “He needed _help_. Not—not _swift justice_ , or whatever the Gauthiers thought they were dispensing, it—”

Theo finally finds his voice. “No one is saying it’s okay. _Liam_ ,” he presses, when Liam scoffs and jerks his head away, breaking their locked gazes. “No one is saying it’s okay, it’s just—”

“—the way things are?” Liam finishes for him, turning back with this _awful_ little curl to his lips. “The way things have to be?”

“ _No_ ,” Theo snaps immediately, though some small, twisted part of himself—the small, twisted part of himself that spends _hours_ staring at his tattoos sometimes; the part of himself that Liam once accused of never leaving his trial—says _yes_. “That’s _not_ what I was going to—”

But Liam doesn’t give him a chance to finish. 

“I hate it, Theo!” He shouts, right over the top of Theo’s protest, which dies right there in Theo’s mouth. Just shrivels up with the way Liam’s voice cracks on that confession. He stares at Liam, expression raw and open-mouthed and just entirely fixed on the way Liam’s words are echoing around his rib-cage, like all his organs—Tara’s _heart_ —have shoved themselves aside to make room. “I hate it,” Liam repeats, more quietly, but just as desperately. 

He turns away again, his hands coming up to cover his mouth. Theo considers taking a step forward, of going to put a hand on his shoulder, _something,_ but can’t. His feet are frozen to the earth. He’s barely breathing.

“I hate it,” Liam whispers one last time, his voice muffled by his palms and almost lost under the rushing of the river. “And it’s—it’s the rest of my _life_.”

He turns back to Theo, then, and Theo _sees_ the distress, and the _trap_ Liam thinks he’s in—thinks he can’t _escape_ —like a bear-trap in the Preserve waiting to snap closed around him. He looks at Theo, and takes his hands away from his mouth, raising them to either side in a helpless, bitter shrug before he drops them heavily back down to his sides.

“I’m Scott’s second,” he says, giving the words weight like _chains_. “This is the rest of my goddamn life.” He stops, and looks away from Theo, his head shaking slowly again. “ _Fighting_ these kinds of battles.” His lips quirk bitterly. “ _Losing_ these kinds of battles.”

“You didn’t lose today,” Theo disagrees; the only thing he can manage. The rest of his mind is one blasted-clean _blank_ , just one continuous loop of staring at Liam and seeing—someone he’s not entirely sure he recognizes. Of thinking _I didn’t know, I didn’t know_.

Of thinking: _how could I not have known?_

But of course he does know how, and so does Liam: _I can see why you’ve spent so much time avoiding me over the last few years, then._

But across from him, aware or not of Theo’s ongoing turmoil, Liam’s lips just quirk back up in that bitter, awful smile. “Didn’t I?” He replies. “I mean, how could I _not_ have lost,” he wonders, “with the way the deck is stacked?” He looks out, towards the water, and adds, almost inaudible: “How could any of us.”

“Liam,” Theo manages after a long few seconds, and _christ_ his voice sounds shredded. “This doesn’t—this _doesn’t—_ ” the words keep getting stuck in Theo’s throat. He’s surprised by the depth of his own resistance to saying them, but. He swallows, and forces himself onward, “—have to be your life. No one is going to keep you in Beacon Hills, not if you don’t want to stay.”

He’s trying to be comforting. He’s trying to _understand_. But Liam just looks incredulously at him, the beginnings of _insult_ starting to write itself across his face.

“You think I can just _walk away?_ ” He demands. “ _Knowing_ that all this is happening?” He stares at Theo, his eyes searching Theo’s face like he’s never _seen_ Theo before. “What kind of person would that make me? What kind of person do you think I _am?_ ”

Theo flinches, but. “You can’t save everybody,” he tells Liam quietly, _aching_ a bit with it.

Liam’s expression twists, that bitter amusement back in _spades_. “Oh, believe me,” Liam assures him. “I know.” His eyes flick, then, deliberate and sharp, to the tattoos on Theo’s arm. “I couldn’t even save _you_.”

Theo can’t speak. He _stares_ at Liam, his expression blown-open and raw; he can feel it. “Liam,” he finally manages, through lips that have gone numb.

But Liam’s own expression just cracks right down the middle, and he shakes his head, and wheels away. He starts down the shore, _slamming_ a hand against a sign-post as he goes. 

“Liam!” Theo yells after him, but Liam just keeps walking away.

\--- 

“Hey, that’s good,” Theo encourages, sat in the back of his car with the trunk left open and watching as Alec manages to extend one claw at a time, one after the other, in a prickly wave. “That’s really good,” except then: “Hey, hey, hey,” he chants quickly, switching his grip from cupping the back of Alec’s palms to gently caging his wrists as Alec _jolts_ , and all of his claws pop out at once. “It’s okay. _It’s okay_. It’s just Derek.”

He releases Alec’s wrists as Alec’s slumps over on an explosive, shaky breath. “ _Jesus_ ,” Alec pants, and then manages to lift his head just enough to shoot Theo a rueful look through gold-flared eyes as he wonders, “How long do you think it’ll be before I can hear engines like that without panicking?” 

His teeth are sharp behind his shakily smiling lips, but he doesn’t cut his tongue open on his fangs. It’s an improvement, and even if it wasn’t: “Go easy on yourself,” Theo instructs him gently, quirking him a smile and clapping him once on the shoulder before hopping down from the trunk. “You’ve had a long week.”

Alec stays in the trunk—head down and clearly struggling to drop the shift—as Derek pulls his Toyota to a slow, bumping stop a few feet behind Theo’s car, and parks. Theo leaves him to it, hands in his pockets as he wanders his way over to the driver’s side of Derek’s car, and then leans against the hood as Derek steps down, and pushes his door closed.

“Hey,” Derek greets. His eyes flick from Theo to Alec and then Theo can immediately see his brow furrow, a slight line of concentration appearing as he—Theo bets—stretches out his senses, looking for Liam. He must find him, because his expression goes sympathetic. Theo shrugs, and glances away.

Derek reaches back a hand and clasps his arm briefly, his palm upside down and his grip firm, as he passes Theo on the way to Theo’s car, and Alec. Theo gives himself exactly five seconds to continue leaning against Derek’s hood, his eyes on nothing, and then he forces himself upright, and goes to join them.

Alec has made it down from Theo’s trunk by the time Theo does. He’s wiping his palms nervously on his jeans, though, his expression a little tight and his shoulders hunched in. He’s looking at Derek, but sideways and from underneath a ducked brow; Theo’s abruptly glad that Liam _hadn’t_ returned to the campsite yet, otherwise that vicious cycle of theirs would probably start right back up.

“Sorry,” Alec finally mumbles, and flushes.

But Derek, bless him, just quirks an easy, rueful smile and says, “I’m not going to take it personally. This is probably the weirdest day you’ve had in a while.”

Something flashes across Alec’s face. “Actually I think that award goes to a few nights ago, when—” He doesn’t finish, but he does raise his right arm—where he’d been bitten—and wave it around a little. When he drops it, his expression is calmer and his shoulders straighter; he manages a shaky smile of his own. 

Theo feels his own shoulders start to relax.

“We need to, to get on the road, right?” Alec says next, his gaze darting from Derek to Theo with a question on his face. “Theo said something about—the full moon.”

“It’s coming up,” Derek agrees dryly. “So, yeah. We should get going, make sure we get back to Beacon Hills with plenty of time to spare.” He jerks his chin back towards his car. “It’s unlocked.”

Alec interprets that for the silent instruction it clearly is, and nods. He starts for Derek’s car, and then stops, twisting around to face Theo again. “Thank you,” he says, gratitude swelling his vowels. “Really, thank you.” 

Theo nods; his throat feels too tight to speak. Alec starts walking again, and then abruptly stops, and this time when he twists around to face Theo again he does it fast enough that he almost unbalances himself. He catches himself with a grimace that he turns into a self-deprecating smile. Theo waits.

“Would you, um,” he starts, stammering a bit. “Would you tell Liam _thank you_ , too? And, and that,” his expression takes on a sly sort of amusement, tempered as it is by his general coltishness towards his new body, and senses, and reality, “I look forward to seeing him back in Beacon Hills. Where, you know, hopefully one day we’ll be able to be in the same room together without causing grievous property damage.”

Theo can’t help but be hooked by the absurdity; he barks a laugh. “I’ll tell him,” he assures Alec, and watches as Alec grins—for real this time—and picks his way the rest of the way to Derek’s car. 

Derek’s smirking, too, but when Alec closes the passenger door behind himself, his expression sobers some. His gaze comes to rest on Theo’s face. Theo feels the amusement fall off his own face, and he lets his head hang on a boneless neck as he touches his tongue to his bottom lip, his eyes on the ground in front of him.

“Thanks for coming,” he tells Derek, though he says it more to the grass and earth at his feet. “Sorry for—interrupting your summer plans.”

Derek just shrugs, seemingly unbothered. And _then_ he adds, “Don’t be. You won me a hundred bucks.”

Theo’s confused until he isn’t. Some of the heaviness in his chest dries up and blows away as he realizes, wry: “You bet on us. You bet, what, that something newsworthy would happen?”

Derek smirks, easy and unashamed. “The second Liam invited himself along,” he agrees. He shifts his shoulders in an easy, unbothered roll. “Stiles thought one or both of you would get arrested. Lydia was _positive_ you’d leave Liam on the side of the road somewhere.”

Theo snorts; he can perfectly picture that, actually. There’d been a few moments where the option would have been attractive. “And you?” He asks, curious.

Some of the amusement fades from Derek’s expression. The look he shoots Theo is apologetic. Not _sorry_ ; just apologetic. Theo gets the sudden feeling that he knows where this is going, and he’s proven right a second later when Derek replies, quiet: “I knew it’d have something to do with one of the clans.”

“Yeah,” Theo says, after a beat, and leaves it at that. Out of all of the McCall pack, he and Derek were probably the two who needed the least additional explanation of that claim. Theo forces the thought away—and deliberately _doesn’t_ let himself look down at his left arm, though he can feel his tattoos prickling—and shakes himself. “Anyway, Alec’s right. You should get going.”

Derek nods, but doesn’t move. His eyes search Theo’s face. “You going to be okay?” He asks. His chin jerks out, towards the river and the trees surrounding the campsite as he does it; that _you_ encompasses more than Theo.

“We’ll be fine,” Theo answers, and is even relatively sure he means it. “I mean, if we’ve made it _this_ far without killing each other…” He adds, though the humor falls somewhat flat. 

Derek doesn’t comment, thankfully. Theo squints back at him.

“ _You_ going to be okay?” He wonders. He tips his head towards Alec in the car. “All this couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, but Derek—he’s _new_.”

Derek just flicks a dismissive hand through the air. “We’ll be fine. But,” he adds, amusement back and sharp on his face, “Stiles is flying into Columbus and we’re picking him up along the way, so, y’know.” His lips quirk. “Keep me in your prayers.”

Theo laughs. Derek grins back, and offers out a forearm that he immediately uses to pull Theo into a one-armed embrace, when Theo takes it. Theo returns it, something gone tight in his spine starting to loosen. Derek pushes him gently back by the shoulders, and holds him there, eyes on Theo’s face.

“You did good today, and so did _he_.” Derek nods once again towards the river, and woods. “Tell him that,” he requests. “And tell him he did it under impossible circumstances.”

Whatever had gone loose in Theo’s spine tightens right back up. His throat closes up enough that it’s hard to swallow, too, though Theo manages it. “I’ll try,” he croaks, too honest. 

Derek searches his face, and then uses the fingers he still has around Theo’s shoulders to squeeze, once, before dropping his hands, and quirking a sympathetic smile. “See you later, Theo,” he says, and heads for his car. 

Theo echoes him, quietly, and stays watching the space where Derek’s car had been long after Derek actually pulls out of the campsite—Alec waving a final goodbye through the windshield—and drives away. Finally he sighs, and heads back for his own car.

He doesn’t actually know what time it is when the backseat to his car opens, and Liam finally climbs inside; he’d given up on waiting and had just shifted into his full-shift form, and curled up in a tight, heavy ball, and forced himself to try to sleep. It must have worked, because Theo jolts awake and goes to reflexively twist around to look at him when Liam crawls in beside him.

But Liam just catches his head, preventing him. His hold isn’t _hard_ —Theo could push past it if he wanted to—but his hand is trembling a bit; Theo relaxes his neck, after a confused, concerned beat, and lets Liam gently push his head back around. Liam presses himself up to Theo’s lupine back after that, his face buried in the fur at Theo’s ruff.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, his lips rustling Theo’s fur at the back of his sensitive neck and making Theo shiver. “I’m sorry, I know nothing that happened today was your fault. You were just doing the best you could, I’m sorry,” he just keeps mumbling. 

Theo isn’t sure whether he’s imagining the feel of hot, wet _dampness_ against his skin or not, but he holds himself absolutely still regardless. One of Liam’s hands comes to rest on his side, Liam’s fingers threading through and then _twisting_ in the fur there. Theo shifts closer back against him, helpless to stop himself, and equally helpless to stop the low whine that leaves his throat, Liam’s scent sour and distressing on his tongue.

“I just keep thinking,” Liam confesses, leaving off the explicit apologies for the moment but with his voice still absolutely _soaked_ with them, “that you were going to go on this trip _alone_ , originally. And if you’d, if you’d been _alone_ when Chandler put that knife to your neck, and Gaven hadn’t shown up when he did…”

He doesn’t complete the thought, but then again—he doesn’t need to. Theo whines again and tries to squirm around, but Liam clamps his hand down; lifts a knee and presses it against Theo’s back haunches, pinning him. 

“No, please,” he pleads. “Just, _just—_ ” 

Theo forces himself to relax back down, but he’s still _panting_ some, Liam’s distress hooking _deep_ into his instincts, and his lupine brain just _that_ much more incapable of resisting them. Liam’s gripping fingers loosen, when he feels Theo’s surrender, and start to gently stroke instead; an apology. 

“I’m sorry,” Liam says again. Theo really wishes he would _stop_. He bites back another whine. Liam buries his face deeper, _harder_ , against Theo’s ruff. “I’m sorry, I’m _sorry_.” 

He repeats it a few more mumbled times, his hand stroking down Theo’s side in concert, and Theo’s lupine brain is a _mess_ of conflicting instincts. He shudders; can’t stop it.

“And it’s not just that,” Liam finally adds, his voice hoarse from his apologies or whatever’s going on in his own chest; his own head. “Think about it. We’ve been _late_. I fucked up your whole schedule when I came, because I kept—kept, _whatever_.” He swallows; Theo can literally feel Liam’s throat work against the back of his neck, Liam is pressed so close to him. “That’s the only reason you and I were there to see the Gauthiers bring in Alec. What if we hadn’t been there?”

That exact thought had occurred to Theo earlier, and he’d had to _stop_ thinking it, almost immediately. He whimpers. Liam’s fingers tighten in his fur. His knee presses harder down against Theo’s back haunches.

“They would have killed him,” Liam concludes, whispered and harsh. “And we would never have— _no one_ would ever have known. He wouldn’t even have been a _statistic_.”

Theo whines again. Liam’s gripping fingers slide deeper around his chest, his knee doing the same, and he _presses_ himself harder forward against Theo’s back; hard enough that Theo can pick out Liam’s individual ribs against his spine, that he can feel every too-fast, shallow breath Liam takes as he buries his face even harder against Theo’s neck and starts to _shake_ , a bit.

“What am I going to do, Theo?” Liam manages, voice thick. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t. I—” He cuts off on a desperate noise, and digs his face harder into Theo’s neck. 

Theo doesn’t know what to do, either. He considers shifting back. He considers trying to turn around. In the end he does the only thing he can think of; the only thing that Liam seems to want him to do. 

He stays right where he is, and lets Liam press his hot face, and his shaking body, to Theo’s own. He doesn’t move. 

\---

Traffic around Boston is a nightmare pretty much no matter the time of day, and so Theo and Liam spend an hour not talking to each other stuck in the cacophonous mess of it, in addition to the six hours they’d _already_ spent not talking to each other on the drive from the campsite, until Theo finally manages to maneuver them out of it, and back above a fifteen mile-an-hour crawl.

He’s pointed his car towards the MIT campus, some of the city sprawl giving way to suburbia, when Liam finally does speak up. “Hey,” he says, hushed even though the music is on low, and the background noise outside the car is minimal. “You mind dropping me off at Lydia’s and Stiles’ and Derek’s place? I’m wiped. Could use an opportunity to sleep in a bed that several hundred other random strangers _haven’t_ slept in.”

Theo forces himself not to acknowledge the way something sharp twists in his chest at Liam’s words, and in casting around for a distraction he lands on a reflexive and, really, objectively bad joke. “I’m not sure that’s much of a trade,” he counters. “I wouldn’t think of any of the flat surfaces in their house as _untouched_ , considering.” Even as he says it he’s already flicking on his turn signal, changing lanes.

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Liam’s lips quirk. The seeming smile of it doesn’t touch his eyes. “Yeah, well,” he says, and nothing else. Theo gives it a few more seconds, and then turns his head even further forward when Liam doesn’t continue, so that he can’t really see Liam at all.

Lydia’s and Stiles’ and Derek’s townhouse is within walking distance of campus, so dropping Liam off—and idling on the street while Liam tries, fails, and then succeeds on the second try to remember the code to the front door—isn’t much of a detour. Still, Theo feels strange as he drives away without Liam. His car seems too quiet; empty. He’d gotten used to Liam sitting beside him again.

 _Idiot_ , he berates himself savagely. He exhales out roughly, and shoves the stinging thought away.

If traffic is a nightmare in Boston then finding visitor parking on MIT’s campus is whatever’s worse than that, even in the midst of summer. Theo fights through the crowds of tank-topped undergrads and harried-looking grad students and slightly less harried-looking professors, circling around the cramped streets until he finds an open spot. He retrieves the box containing the magical artifact Lydia needs from his trunk, and then stands with it braced on his hip while he fiddles with his phone, pulling up the parking app and setting the meter for the maximum allowed time. He also texts Lydia to let her know he’s arrived while he’s got his phone in his hand.

But it’s not Lydia who comes to escort him into the building. “Mr. Raeken!” Dr. Sapuppo greets as he badges open the door, and waves Theo benevolently inside. Theo fights not to grimace, and instead manages to turn it into a vaguely friendly smile as he edges his way past Lydia’s grad advisor, and nods at the guard sitting behind the security desk. He can’t remember the man’s name but he’s seen him—and been seen—enough times that the man’s eyes are knowingly sympathetic when he nods back. Theo’s smile becomes a little more real, then, amused.

“This way, this way,” Dr. Sapuppo is chattering, leading Theo down several sets of hallways and taking turns seemingly at random. They arrive at an elevator bank, and Dr. Sapuppo pops his finger against the _Up_ button and then turns back to Theo as they wait. He’s bouncing a little on his toes. “I was hoping to catch you,” he confesses. “I wanted to ask—”

He keeps right on asking through all five floors of the elevator ride, until the elevator finally _dings_ and slides open its doors to let them spill out onto the fifth floor. Theo answers the bare minimum of Dr. Sapuppo’s questions that he can and outright deflects some others, an awkward sort of discomfort settling in his gut. Stiles always claimed that Dr. Sapuppo’s interest in the parascientific—there was a _reason_ Lydia had chosen him for her grad advisor—aligned more with the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Thor, what-you-know-as-magic-we-know-as-science, kind of take, but to Theo it’s always veered too close to his memories of the Doctors. 

Not to mention, Dr. Sapuppo’s frankly _alarming_ fascination with the whole concept of chimeras had led to Theo drunkenly vowing one night, stood in the middle of Lydia’s and Stiles’ and Derek’s kitchen with a bottle of aconite-laced booze in hand, that he’d _never_ let Sapuppo get anywhere _near_ Corey or Mason. Stiles had called him a drama queen, but he also hadn’t _disagreed._

Lydia’s wearing a white coat and bent over a microscope when Dr. Sapuppo finishes escorting Theo into her lab, her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail and one hand outstretched over a spiral notebook as she absently scribbles notes. She looks the very definition of a cliche, and Theo tells her so. 

“Doesn’t hurt to look the part,” she retorts. “Unlike whatever you’re supposed to be.” The comment doesn’t exactly make sense, but Theo knows what she’s actually getting at; her gaze lingers on the circles underneath Theo’s eyes, which even Theo’s healing hadn’t been able to fully erase. 

This time he does grimace, and replies, “Chimera Postal Express,” mainly for something to say. But it makes him think of Liam, and he has to fight off a flinch, which Lydia no doubt catches; it would have been better if he’d just kept his mouth shut.

Her eyes stay sharp on his face for a few seconds longer, and then they flick sideways. “Thank you, Gianni,” she tells Dr. Sapuppo, warm but brisk, then: “You’ve got the faculty meeting in ten minutes,” she reminds him.

Dr. Sapuppo exclaims, and explodes into a veritable flurry of movement as he starts gathering things up, chattering to Lydia all the while. She hums in acknowledgement as he does, and doesn’t actually drop the somewhat absent smile on her face until the door to the lab closes after him. Then, she looks back at Theo.

“Sorry,” she tells him, sounding genuinely so. “I was going to come get you myself, but I couldn’t risk leaving this unattended.” She gestures to the experiment at her elbow.

“It’s fine,” Theo dismisses. He finds a bare stretch of table to set the box in his arms down on, and starts fiddling with it, flipping the various clasps and locks—and pressing a bitten-and-therefore-bloody fingertip to the edge of the lid to disengage the warding magics—until he can open it. Lydia comes to stand at his side, and peer clinically down at the artifact.

“Thanks,” she murmurs, and then she reaches carefully forward so that she can cup her hands around the artifact, and lift it gently out of the box. She twists it this way and that as she studies it. “You used this before?” She questions, glancing at him.

“Personally? No,” Theo answers, then: “But I’ve seen it used.” His voice is deliberately neutral when he says that last part. It doesn’t stop the memories from rising in his mind’s eye, but it’s something.

Lydia almost definitely catches his tone, but she also moves right past it. The lack of acknowledgement is a gift, and Theo seizes it, and moves right past it, too. He watches her as she watches the artifact, her fingers playing carefully over its sides. 

Finally Lydia switches her attention from the artifact to Theo. It doesn’t become any less clinical. “You mind staying, and helping me configure this?” She phrases it like a request but it’s actually an offer. Theo wonders when the hell he became so transparent.

“Yeah,” he replies, a bit stunned by the force of his own relief. He’d hadn’t realized how much he’d been _dreading_ going back to Lydia’s and Stiles’ and Derek’s house, and existing in various flavors of tortuously awkward quiet with Liam. “Sure.”

It takes Lydia almost an hour to walk him through the details of her planned experiment. It’d probably have taken less time, except that Theo had kept stopping her to ask clarifying questions, and point out potential issues. By the end he has his own pad full of notes in his lap, balanced on his thigh from where he’s sitting with his knees sprawled wide on a lab stool. He gives them a critical final glance over, and scrawls a few last notes to himself. But once done, instead of hopping down from the stool and beginning to configure the artifact as requested, he touches his tongue to his bottom lip, and then bites it, and then looks up at Lydia, who’s already looking expectantly back at him.

“Did you know?” He asks her. He realizes he’s given her precisely _none_ of the necessary context for his question even before her brow starts to furrow, and he clarifies, “About Liam. About how…trapped he feels.”

Something pained flashes across Lydia’s face. She drops her attention immediately to the various lab slides and Petri dishes and other experimental detritus in front of her, and she fiddles with them for a few seconds—the nervous movements so unlike her, but so _very_ like Stiles—before she finally sighs, and drops down onto her own lab stool to face him. “Yes,” she admits. “He’s not exactly great at hiding it. It’s hard to miss.”

Something bitter, and sharp, twists in Theo’s chest. He jerks his gaze away from her, and out towards the lab’s windows. He stares out of them, his eyes absently jumping from one person to the next walking or jogging or meandering by on the grounds below as he confesses, soft: “I did. I missed it.”

But where he’d expected—sympathy, maybe, a continuation of the unspoken understanding that Lydia had granted him since he’d arrived, he gets a Derek-like snort and a head shake. His attention jerks back to her, surprised. 

“No,” Lydia disagrees. “You didn’t _miss it_. ‘Missing it’ implies a level of negligence, or at least cluelessness. What you did was much more deliberate.” She isn’t exactly accusing him of anything, but she isn’t _not_ doing that, either.

“Lydia,” Theo barely manages, stunned.

Lydia lets out another of those heavy sighs, and looks away from him. She reaches up to tug her hair loose, and then runs her fingers back through it, untangling it. She tells him, “No one blamed you for it. We all understood why you started acting the way you did, even if we didn’t agree with it.”

Theo jerks his attention away again, something hot and that feels almost like _shame_ sliding down his throat as he swallows. “What else was I supposed to do? You were at my trial. I _told you_ what Quentin—”

“You did,” Lydia interrupts. Her voice is more gentle, now. “Like I said, no one blamed you for it. No one blames you for it _now_.”

Theo glances up at her. The smile he manages to give her is as pained as it is rueful. “I think at least one person does.”

 _Now_ Lydia gives him a sympathetic smile. “Yeah, well. You can’t exactly blame _him_ for _that_.”

“No,” Theo agrees, after a second. “No, I can’t.”

The silence drags. After a half-minute or so Theo gives up, and tosses his pad of notes onto the table next to him so that he can hop off the stool, and reach for the artifact to start configuring it. A handful of feet away from him, Lydia takes his apparent cue and leans back over her own work. 

Theo means to let it go. He _does_ , but. He blows out another harsh breath, and braces his hands on the table as he lets his head hang between them. He stares sightlessly at the artifact in front of him for a moment before twisting his head sideways to look at Lydia instead. She’s already looking expectantly back.

“He told me—” Theo starts. He has to stop, and swallow, and try again. “He told me he thinks I’m—stuck in the past. That I’m never going to leave my trial.”

It hurts to say. It’d hurt to _hear_ , but it hurts worse to say, especially when: “The evidence would suggest he’s right,” Lydia replies, gentle and apologetic but just—honest.

Theo flinches, and brings his hands up to rake back through his hair. He spends a few seconds with his fingers just _gripping_ at the strands between them, and then he drops them back towards the table. He stops them before they would have slammed into it, but ends up jamming them back down harder than just setting them there would have. His palms sting right along with the frustration—and what feels disturbingly like _grief_ —in his chest.

“I don’t know what to do,” he admits, and glances sideways at her again. He winces, remembering Liam pressing those same words into his spine last night, but he forces himself not to look away. He gives a half-shrug, helpless. “I just—have no idea what to do, about any of it.”

Lydia doesn’t say anything right away, and then she slowly makes her way forward, so that she’s standing at Theo’s side. His brow furrows as he watches her, but she just reaches across his chest until she can retrieve his left arm, and bring it back to herself. Theo ends up half-twisted, but too stunned to shift as he stares at her.

Lydia just sighs, and presses a gentle palm to the Argent fleur-de-lis, and the McCall stacked circles, tattooed on his arm; the magics shift and shiver and prickle in response. She keeps her eyes fixed on his while she does it. 

“I know you think you owe them,” she tells him quietly. “I know you think that you can’t take any risks, or do anything that might even have the _potential_ to blow back on them, because of what they did for you.”

Her fingers tighten around his forearm, not painful but hard enough that if he wasn’t already hanging on her every word, she’d claim the rest of his attention.

“But Scott, and Chris, took responsibility for you so that you could _live_ ,” she reminds him, her voice soft but _fierce_. “Not—whatever it is that you’ve been doing ever since they did.”

Theo stops _breathing_. He can’t do anything in response to Lydia’s words but _stare_ at her, stunned. In the absence of air his ribcage feels like it's gone _hollow_ , like his lungs and Tara’s heart and all his other organs have up and disappeared to make room for Lydia’s words to echo around in instead, ringing and ringing with all the rock-hard certainty of truth. Theo _stares_.

Lydia just looks right back, her palm still pressed to his tattoos. Finally she reaches up, and cups a hand around his jaw—Theo’s held breath finally _shuddering_ loose of his chest at the touch—and gives him a flicker of a sympathetic smile. She studies him for a few seconds longer, her eyes flicking back and forth between his, and then she squeezes the hand she still has on his arm, and drops her other hand away from his face.

“I’ve got this from here,” she tells him, after clearing her throat. Her voice is back to being brisk, and clinical. “It’ll be another few hours of work before I’m done for the day, but I’ll see you back at the house.” 

It’s a dismissal, and one that’s kindly meant. It might also be practical; Theo attempting to configure a delicate and potentially volatile ancient artifact _now_ might be the height of stupidity. In either case, it’s meant to give him an opening, a chance to retreat without needing to ask for the opportunity, so that he can go figure out what to do with the truth that Lydia just offered him. Theo nods, his voice too tight to speak, and starts to straighten from his hunched, reflexively defensive posture. 

Lydia stops him again. “Thank you,” she says, still brisk but genuine. “For bringing this to me,” she nods towards the artifact, “and for helping me figure out how to configure it.” She searches his face for a few seconds longer, and then adds, more quietly: “I’ll see you tonight.”

“Yeah,” Theo manages to croak, “See you,” and then he _flees_. 

\---

He hesitates going back to Lydia’s and Stiles’ and Derek’s place, though; every part of himself feels raw like an exposed nerve, and he’s not sure he can handle seeing Liam.

But his paranoia turns out to be moot: Liam isn’t even at the house, when he gets there. That leads to a whole _new_ round of panic when Theo realizes that, especially after he checks his phone and sees the complete lack of messages there, but then he stops, and forces himself to take a deep breath. _You’re not his goddamn keeper,_ he reminds himself harshly. Really, he’s whatever the _opposite_ of Liam’s keeper is.

He’d made himself that way. _You didn’t ‘miss it_ ,’ Lydia had said. _What you did was much more deliberate._

Theo drops his head back against the headrest of his seat, his eyes squeezing shut and his breath just rushing out of him on an exhale, like it couldn’t stand being trapped between his ribs with him any longer, either. He lets himself stay like that for another half-minute, a minute, two, and then he forces himself to get out, and head inside. 

Liam’s scent in the house is stale enough to tell Theo that he’s been gone for a few hours already, at least; he’d left almost immediately after Theo had dropped him off. Sighing, Theo forces his twitching fingers away from his phone in his pocket, and heads towards the sliding glass door into the house’s tiny backyard. The route takes him through the kitchen, though, and as he’s passing the island, he sees a scribbled note left on the granite. He stops, and snags it with his fingertips to pull it closer to himself.

Liam’s chicken scratch writing is immediately recognizable. _Took a Lyft to go see the Kollmanns. Back later._ _— L_

That tight ball of something that had wound itself around Theo’s spine—justified or not—loosens, some. Lydia and Stiles and Derek had become so close with the Kollmann pack over the years that the pack itself had practically become whatever the supernatural-specific version of extended family is. _Liam’s fine_ , Theo forces himself to think _again_ , and then: _And he’s still not your responsibility._

“Kind of miss the days when I was his, though,” Theo confesses to the empty, silent air of Lydia’s and Stiles’ and Derek’s kitchen, and then he abruptly gets so entirely sick of himself that he slams his way back out of the house, and to his car.

Every spot at every visitor lot to Harold Parker State Forest is _packed_ with cars, but Theo’s desperate enough that he finally just picks one at random, and pulls up to the very end of one row, and parks on the grass. In doing so he’s every tourist he’s ever sneered at, but that’s hardly the worst of the things he’s disappointed in himself for right now, so it’s easy to shove it aside; to bury it underneath the mass of other, sharp-edged and _biting_ things clawing up his chest. He gets out of his car.

The trails will be as packed as the parking lots but to Theo it’s irrelevant: he veers off the main trail almost immediately and picks his way deeper and deeper into the woods until he’s sure he’s hidden by the tangled branches, and then he stops. 

_I bet there’s a part of you that wishes you could run_ , Liam had said to him all those days ago, and yeah, Theo wishes he could _run_. From a lot of things, really; himself included. But the best he can do is strip out of his human clothes, and shake loose of his human skin, and run away from the pile of them that he leaves behind, his lupine lungs almost immediately starting to pant and bellow from his speed and the heat and the way that branches and bushes and sharp-tipped rocks catch and scrape at his sides and paws and muzzle as he _runs_.

But his memories come with him. But his _past_ comes with him.

When he finally staggers to a halt, he doesn’t so much stop running as _collapse_. His limbs shake and he can barely breathe, his lungs struggling to draw in more than short, unsatisfying huffs of air that he immediately has to wheeze back out. His vision starts to spot. _Way to give yourself heatstroke,_ some small corner of his mind manages to sneer, and then his instincts take over, and he staggers his shaky way over on unsteady paws to the running water he can hear flowing nearby.

He doesn’t hesitate, just walks right into it.

The shock of the cold is enough to make him _yelp_ ; several birds in the trees squawk in protest at the noise and take flight, but Theo barely notices. He closes his eyes and forces himself to lay down on the shore, deep enough in the creek that the water runs over and around him, but he can keep his head above water as he breathes.

It’s not easy. Before his lungs had been struggling in the heat, and now they’re struggling in the _cold_ , but Theo doesn’t let himself move. Bit by bit his body’s core temperature cools, until he feels less like he’s going to burn up with the heat and more like himself.

It’s not—the greatest improvement.

It’s enough that he stops, and shifts back—deep enough in the woods and miles away from any trails, or campgrounds, not to worry about being seen—and then twists around, off of his hands and knees, so that he can collapse onto his back, still half-in the water. It runs over his legs and feet and hips, rocks digging uncomfortably into his back and sides, and it leaves his arms bare to the open air. Theo stares up at the sky, his arms left pointedly by his sides, so they’re out of his vision, and then he exhales roughly out, and closes his eyes, and lifts them up.

When he opens them again, he’s holding his left forearm braced over his face with his right. He’s looking directly up at his tattoos.

 _I know you think you owe them_ , Lydia had said, and Theo _does_ , he really _does_. And not just for the obvious. Not just for the desperate way that Scott’s voice had cracked at Theo’s trial when he’d stood up and had offered—had _demanded_ , really—to take responsibility for Theo, and all of Theo’s crimes. 

_I wasn’t nine in the tunnels with Josh and Tracy,_ Theo had yelled at Liam. He hadn’t been nine in the high school library with his claws buried deep in Scott’s stomach. He hadn’t been nine in the operating theater with his claws dug deep in Lydia’s neck. He hadn’t been nine when he’d lured Ailene Storo away from the safety of her pack so that the Doctors could claim her, just one more experimental ingredient to add to the list.

He hadn’t been nine, he hadn’t been nine: he hadn’t been nine for a very long time.

 _Don’t do this,_ he’d begged Scott in that held-breath moment between Scott first offering to take responsibility for him and Scott wrapping his ink-and-blood covered fingers around Theo’s forearm, sealing the deal. He hadn’t lied when he’d told Scott it was too big a risk for Scott to take, that throwing away all his potential to _change things_ just to keep Quentin Storo from exacting his completely justified revenge on Theo was an idiotic trade, but that hadn’t been his only reason. 

The other reason—the _real_ reason: Theo hadn’t been nine for a very long time, and he‘d known that better than anyone.

Except that Scott had said: _you’re not the same person that went into the skinwalker prison._ He’d said: _you’re not even the same person who came_ out _of it._

He’d said: _I want to see who you can become, given the opportunity._

And Theo had become someone, certainly. He’d become a member of Scott’s pack, a diplomat; the Chimera Postal Express. He’d become the type of person who sees more of the McCall pack’s allied packs and hunter clans than Scott does, who knows their names and families and histories and stories. He’d become _part_ of those stories, even. He’d made his own.

 _I have a good life,_ he thinks to himself, his left thumb tracing absently over the lines and whorls of the Argent fleur-de-lis on his arm. A better life than he deserved, really, and all because Scott had said, _I want to see who you can become, given the opportunity,_ and then, _I can give you that opportunity,_ and then he’d gone and done it, and he’d led Theo out of his trial, and out of that room in Shohreh’s house, and back to Beacon Hills; to the McCall pack.

Or he’d tried to, anyway.

 _I know you think you owe them,_ Lydia had said. _I know you think that you can’t take any risks, or do anything that might even have the_ potential _to blow back on them, because of what they did for you,_ she’d continued. And she’d been _right_ ; Theo feels the truth of it in each of his cells, written into every move and thought and desire he’s had since Scott and Argent had stood up and offered to save Theo’s life for no other reason than because they _could_ , and they _wanted_ to. 

But a truth is rarely the _only_ truth, and there’s another that lives somewhere deeper in Theo’s chest, inside Tara’s heart beating between his ribs, and that other truth is this: 

_You’re never going to leave that place, are you? You’re never going to let yourself,_ Liam had said. And Theo hadn’t. He may have physically walked out of his trial, and out of that room in Shohreh’s house, but he’d carried both with him. He’d reconstructed them out of his own blood and flesh and bones: he’d turned himself into his own prison, locked tight with the tattoos on his arm, because he hadn’t been nine in a very long time.

And _christ_. Earlier Theo had looked at Lydia, and had asked: _did you know about Liam? How trapped he feels?_ , like the _worst_ textbook definition of irony. He drops his arms over his face to cover his eyes as he squeezes them shut. He can’t stop the helpless, humorless laugh that escapes his closed-up throat, because _jesus_.

Liam may have been trapped by circumstance, but Theo had trapped _himself_.

“I don’t know what to do,” Theo confesses again, this time to the quietly rushing water and the slowly swaying trees and the empty sky above him. 

But he doesn’t hear the water, or the rustle of the branches. What he hears is: _Scott, and Chris, took responsibility for you so that you could_ live _. Not—whatever it is that you’ve been doing ever since they did._

Theo drops his arms, and spends a few more seconds staring up at the sky, and then he rolls over, and onto his feet. 

\--- 

When he gets back to Lydia’s and Stiles’ and Derek’s house, Liam is sitting on the front porch with a sweating bottle of something in hand. There are several more bottles in a cardboard carrier by his hip. Theo meets his eyes by reflex, by accident, and then he looks away as he swallows so that he can concentrate on parking.

“Hey,” Liam greets quietly, as Theo picks his way up the walk a half-minute or so later. Sometime in the intervening moments while Theo was wedging his car into the bare minimum of street parking left, Liam had put aside his own bottle, and uncapped a second. He holds it out. 

Theo takes it, when he gets close enough. He joins Liam on the porch, putting first an elbow down and then twisting around to sit. It’s only then that he realizes the bottles are full of aconite-laced beer, the smell sharp and prickling in his nose. He shoots Liam a questioning look. Liam shrugs, and picks his bottle back up.

“The Kollmanns,” he answers easily. Something like a smile twists itself onto his mouth, and he looks away from Theo and towards the street as he adds, offhand: “They seemed to think I needed it.” He takes a sip after, his lips still quirked around the mouth of the bottle, though the curve of it doesn’t touch his eyes.

Theo can’t help huffing a laugh, because yeah: that had probably been, and remains, true. He takes a drink of his own beer as that thought twists something in his chest. He looks out towards the street, mirroring Liam’s position. But it’s as he’s sitting there, and listening to the constant low-grade hum of background yelling, and honking, and distant construction happening _somewhere_ , always, in Boston, he realizes he _isn’t_ hearing something specific.

“Where’s Lydia?” He asks, tilting his head up to glance at Liam over his own shoulder. He’d sat a few steps lower than Liam on purpose; he’d already had his unsatisfying fill of seeing Liam silent out of the corner of his eye during their drive in. He doesn’t need a repeat, possible conciliatory beer or no.

“Went to dinner at a friend’s,” Liam replies. He keeps his head facing the street but flicks his eyes down to meet Theo’s, his tongue burrowing into his cheek. “I think she’s giving us _space_.”

Theo barks a laugh. “Well, she is the genius of the pack,” he agrees. 

The shared joke at their own expense helps. Theo relaxes a little more completely against the steps, and raises his beer to his lips to take a long pull. He exhales out through his nose, low and long, and tips his face back towards the night sky after he’s emptied his lungs of air. The light pollution is bad enough that he can’t really see any stars, but he doesn’t care; he closes his eyes, and concentrates on the humidity prickling over his face, Boston _sweltering_ in the summer even with the sun already having set.

When he slits them back open again a half-minute or so later, Liam is watching him. His expression is unreadable, but his fingers are picking at the label on his beer, and he’s already torn a corner loose. With Liam on the top step and Theo two down, it means that Liam is looking down at him, and that Theo can see the perfect bas-relief ridge of Liam’s throat bob as Liam swallows, and then comments, “You smell like trees and river mud.”

Theo raises both his eyebrows and his shoulders in an easy, acknowledging shrug. “Well, I spent a lot of time today surrounded by trees and river mud, so.” Liam gives him a strange look, so Theo clarifies, “Harold Parker State Forest.”

It’s an innocuous answer to innocuous comment, so Theo isn’t expecting it when Liam’s mouth twists in response, and he jerks his gaze away. “Great,” he bites out, but his sharp tone is self-directed; Theo may have _deliberately missed_ a lot over the years, apparently, but he still knows how to tell the difference. “So I drove you to run away to the middle of the woods. Fucking _fantastic._ ”

His eyes close. He sighs heavily. The label on his beer is practically in _shreds_. Theo instantly, abruptly knows what Liam is about to say, even before Liam actually opens his mouth and manages to get out:

“Theo, I’m—”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Theo interrupts, reflexive and with a harshness that surprises even himself. He meets Liam’s eyes just as reflexively when Liam startles, and glances down at him. “Just do _not_ ,” Theo continues, less harsh but still just as firm, “apologize to me. I cannot—” He has to stop, swallow, and only then can he finish, “—handle you apologizing to me again.”

“Oh-kay,” Liam drawls blankly in response, long and drawn-out. 

He gives Theo another strange look, and then jerks his gaze away and takes a long pull of his beer. As he does so the various strips of the shredded label fall forward against his mouth and cheeks and eyelashes, and he makes a face. Bringing his bottle back down, he gathers up the shreds in one hand, and rips them free, and then twists his chest sideways so that he can jam them into an empty slot in the carrier at his side. Theo watches him without comment, but just as he’s about to turn around—feeling weird studying the stretch of Liam’s turned back as he fiddles with the carrier—Liam suddenly jerks back around.

“Okay, no, this isn’t going to work,” he explodes, all in a rush. “You’re going to have to let me buy a vowel or phone a friend or something, because I _really_ don’t think you and I can be emotional wrecks at the same time. The _universe_ might implode, or something equally—”

But he doesn’t get to finish. When he’d twisted back around, he’d intentionally or not twisted _over_ Theo, half-leaned over him in his anxiety or anticipation for Theo’s response, and it’d put his mouth almost directly over Theo’s. And Theo—he’d looked at Liam’s face hovering over his own, and he’d heard Lydia’s voice in his head again— _Scott, and Chris, took responsibility for you so that you could_ live—and he’d just—leaned up, and had pressed his mouth to Liam’s own.

Liam freezes. 

He freezes for a whole three seconds, and then he shudders out a small sound, and _melts_ down against Theo’s mouth. He kisses Theo back, one of his hands rising to cradle the side of Theo’s face.

But it isn’t long before Liam pulls back. Theo feels Liam’s fingers flutter against his jaw right before he does, a warning of sorts, and he squeezes his eyes shut, and keeps his face tilted up towards Liam’s, not wanting to look and see what expression might be on Liam’s face; not yet. But then Liam’s fluttering fingers start to prod.

“Hey,” he presses, and keeps poking at Theo’s face until Theo grimaces and cracks open one eye. It turns out that the look on Liam’s face is wary, a little suspicious, his eyes narrow and squinting. He searches Theo’s face. “Did you hit your head out there in the woods?” He demands.

“What?” Theo sputters, pulling back.

Or he tries to, anyway. Liam’s fingers around his jaw tighten, and prevent him from going too far. “I’m not _complaining,_ ” he insists, too-loudly. His heartbeat is fast in Theo’s ears. “I’m just—” He trails off, his eyes still searching Theo’s face.

They stare at each other in the silence. Liam’s still holding his head, his fingers ten points of pressure that Theo is hyper-aware of, and his face is still close enough to Theo’s own that Theo can feel Liam’s breath skating over his own lips. He swallows, and considers how— _if_ —he can put into words the feeling he’d had lying flat on his back and looking up at his tattoos and the empty blue sky beyond it as his mind had replayed Lydia’s words over and over again: _Scott, and Chris, took responsibility for you so that you could_ live.

“No head injury,” Theo tells him eventually, his voice croaking a little. He’s a little stunned that he’s still able to _breathe_ through his vice-tight throat. “But I had—an unexpected heart-to-heart with Lydia, so, you know—essentially the same thing.” He gives Liam a wobbly smile, which wobbles even more when Liam gives him one right back. “She said—” He closes his eyes. He can’t look at Liam when he says this. “She _said—_ ”

“Hey, it’s okay,” Liam murmurs, apparently picking up on his distress. He tips his forehead down so that it’s resting against Theo’s own. “It’s okay, you don’t need to—”

“I don’t want to be stuck at my trial anymore, Liam,” Theo interrupts, the confession just seeming to _burst_ out of him. This time when he pulls back, Liam’s fingers are slack enough—with surprise, if the look on his face is anything to go by—that Theo can manage more than a few inches. He searches Liam’s face in turn. “I want to leave that room in Shohreh’s house. I—”

He can’t help it; he surges back up and kisses Liam again. But almost as fast as he’d done it, he pulls back. The look on Liam’s face is still stunned, either from Theo’s confessions or the kiss or both. Theo feels his own expression twist.

“I want to _live_ , Liam,” he says, his voice _cracking_. “I want—to let myself live. I want to let myself want the things that I want. I want to let myself _have_ them, if—if they,” he stops, stumbling a bit as he realizes really for the first time exactly where this next confession is going to lead him, “want me, too.” He flushes.

Liam _stares_ at him. And then all at once _his_ expression twists, and this time, _he_ surges down into Theo, kissing him hard. He does it hard enough that he actually ends up pressing Theo down, into the concrete stairs, half-covering Theo with his own body. Theo hears a sharp clack and then a series of clatters right before both of Liam’s hands come up to cradle his face; Liam trying to set his bottle down somewhere, and apparently managing to set it down on the edge of the porch or a step or something. He doesn’t seem concerned that the rest of his beer is likely spilling out somewhere on the lawn.

“You—you fucking _idiot_ ,” he bites out between kisses. “Did you think I _didn’t?_ ”

He presses both his mouth and his body harder to Theo’s own after that, his tongue stroking _deep_ between Theo’s lips. Theo gets a little lost in it, but.

“I didn’t think it mattered,” he answers breathlessly, pulling back. He literally can’t go far; Liam has him pressed so completely to the steps that the back of his head hits the concrete of the stairs after only an inch or two. Theo barely notices. “I didn’t think I could _let_ it matter,” he corrects, something like _guilt_ swirling in his chest as he stares up at Liam. 

At some point his hands had landed on Liam’s hips, his beer bottle still in one hand and dampening the edge of Liam’s shirt with condensation. Theo’s fingers spasm, both around his bottle and around Liam’s side, his eyes drawn to the wet patch. His expression twists. He grimaces, and rolls out from underneath Liam and to his feet, his beer bottle left wobbling on the step behind himself as he ignores Liam’s protesting _hey!_ , and Liam’s attempt to grab his arm, and takes several steps away as he rakes his hands through his hair.

“And _christ_ ,” he bites out. “This is the absolute _worst_ timing for this.” He wheels back around to face Liam, who’s half-on and half-off of the steps; he looks like he’d frozen midway through standing when Theo had turned back around. Theo’s expression twists again. “Liam, _I’m_ sorry. I know you—feel trapped in Beacon Hills, that you don’t want—”

He doesn’t get the rest out. Liam comes the rest of the way off the steps in enough of a rush that he actually ends up all but running _into_ Theo, Theo reflexively bringing his arms up to catch him, but really his hands just end up acting as air brakes; his and Liam’s mouths still end up colliding. Theo makes a small, confused noise, but before he can even really register the kiss Liam is pulling back again.

His eyes are a little wild as he searches Theo’s face, his hands once more gripped around the sides of it. All at once he demands, his voice cracking a little with desperation: “Ask me how I learned that trick that let me save Alec’s life.”

Theo stares at him, absolutely thrown, but. “How’d you learn that trick that let you save Alec’s life?” He repeats obediently, after a second. 

Liam keeps looking intently right at him. “Scott,” he answers. “At your trial.”

Theo starts to flinch, but almost before he can complete the movement, Liam is diving right back in, and kissing him again. 

“And that’s not the only—” He gasps out, pulling back. 

But almost immediately he yanks Theo’s mouth back to his own for another quick, harsh kiss, and then he rolls his forehead against Theo’s own, his eyes squeezing shut. His fingers tighten around Theo’s jaw, and Theo brings his own hands up to hold his wrists. Not to fight Liam’s grip, or pull them away, just needing—the anchor. The grounding pressure of his skin against Liam’s.

“I’ve got more to learn,” Liam finally continues, opening his eyes and pulling back enough that he can meet Theo’s own. “I’ve got more—more _Alecs_ to help, and I just—”

He squeezes his eyes shut again. He presses his forehead to Theo’s again, hard enough and close enough that his lips are just brushing Theo’s own, though he doesn’t kiss him. He stays like for several long, dragging seconds, his breathing rushing harshly in and out of his nose, and then it calms, some; his fingers around Theo’s face gentle a little. He pulls back, his lips curling in a wobbly smile. 

He says, his voice cracking a little: “And, you know. I’m thinking maybe Beacon Hills isn’t so bad. It’s got _some_ things,” his fingers spasm in Theo’s hair, and his lips flicker in a wider, seemingly helpless smile, “to recommend it.”

“Liam,” Theo breathes, stunned.

“What,” Liam shoots back, clearly going for nonchalant but with his whole _body_ just vibrating a little with anxiety, or restrained excitement, or whatever. “You had—Lydia and your Walden Pond moment out in the woods. I had,” he stops, and swallows, “that really horrible ride into town this morning, and an incredibly raucous werewolf pack, who were really unsympathetic to my plight, actually, and—”

He kisses Theo again.

“You want to try—living,” he summarizes breathlessly, when he pulls back. “And I want to try—being this person I have the opportunity to be.” His eyes flick back and forth between Theo’s own. “What do you think? What if we try together? What if we—we help each other figure out how?”

Theo keeps staring at him. There’s something happening in his chest and he doesn’t know what it is but he _does_ know: “Yes,” he replies, and surges back forward to kiss the wide, helpless smile that starts breaking over Liam’s face. “Yes. _God,_ yes. _Liam—_ ” He cuts himself off. He brings both hands up to hold Liam’s face steady, and kisses and kisses and kisses him.

Out on the street, there’s a loud and impressed-sounding wolf-whistle as a car drives by. 

Liam jerks back from Theo, his eyes wild. His hair’s a mess and his mouth is a bitten red. “We should go inside,” he says, a little blankly. But then his eyes clear a little, and he repeats, more firmly: “Come inside with me.”

“Yeah,” Theo agrees breathlessly. “Yeah, yes,” and stumbles after Liam when Liam grabs his wrist, and starts dragging him towards the front door.

\--- 

Lydia and Stiles and Derek live in a quintessential New England-style townhouse, of course, which means that each of the floors is charmingly cramped but more importantly, separated by more flights of stairs than Theo—and Liam, if his continual bitten-off sounds of frustration are anything to go by—really finds convenient, given the circumstances. 

Theo stumbles again, desperate as he is not to let Liam’s mouth get more than a few bare inches away from his own, and then he groans and gives up when Liam’s response is to just climb on top of him and press him down into the stairs below him, since they’d only made it halfway up to the guest bedrooms on the second floor before Theo had tripped. If he wasn’t a supernatural with supernatural healing, Liam’s obsession with pinning him to stairs would be leading to a really unfortunate set of bruises.

“Jesus, Liam,” Theo gasps out, as Liam ducks his forehead under Theo’s chin to push it _up_ , and expose the side of Theo’s neck so that Liam can _bite_ at it. His hips buck up against Liam’s own, wedged between Theo’s knees, but the bolt of heat that Theo feels when his hard, still jeans-covered cock drags against Liam’s own is immediately counteracted by the pinch of the stair digging directly into his lower spine. Groaning, he heaves upwards and dumps Liam sideways, off of him.

“Hey!” Liam protests, flailing a little. Theo ignores him, and just catches one of his waving arms, and starts dragging _him_ the rest of the way up the stairs. Liam shuts up fast, after that.

But he also waits only as long as it takes them to finish cresting the stairs to once again interrupt all forward progress, and press Theo up against the wall at the top instead. At the absolute last moment Theo manages to jerk his head and shoulders to the side so that they don’t crash into a tastefully framed picture hung on the wall, though they still manage to knock it askew. Theo spends exactly half a second thinking _we’re going to need to fix that_ , and then Liam’s tongue is stroking into his mouth, and he forgets all about it.

He also _jumps_ when he feels Liam’s fingers against the bare skin of his stomach; Liam winding the hem of Theo’s shirt around his knuckles, and leaning back—Theo barely managing to swallow a protesting whine—to yank it up. Theo obediently pushes off the wall with his shoulders so that Liam can finish pulling it over his head, and drop it off to the side. 

He isn’t prepared for the onslaught of sensation when Liam drops back flat against his now bare chest. He _moans_.

“God _damn_ ,” is Liam’s groaned response, Liam’s fingertips _dragging_ down his sides; deliberately digging into the slight depressions between his ribs, and tracing the ridges of his muscles, and hipbones. He pulls away from Theo’s mouth, and starts following the path of his fingers with his lips, and tongue.

“Liam, _ah_ ,” Theo manages to pant out in the split second before Liam skates his mouth from Theo’s collarbone to his left nipple, and _bites_. Liam just pins him harder to the wall when Theo jolts, and keeps biting, and sucking, and laving his tongue over the now-stiff peak of it. His left hand comes up to press his thumb into Theo’s other nipple.

Theo’s hands—which had been clutching at Liam’s hips, before Liam had ducked down—rise to tangle in the shoulders of his shirt instead, twisting it tight between his fingers. _Oh,_ he thinks, open-mouthed and panting and staring down at it through heavy-lidded eyes, _oh_. He tugs more insistently at it. 

Liam digs his teeth more strongly into Theo’s nipple in rebuke, but then he pulls back to yank his own shirt over his head.

If Theo had thought he hadn’t been prepared for the feeling of Liam’s still-clothed chest against his own bare one, it’s _nothing_ to how unprepared he is for the feeling of Liam’s naked skin against his own. He _shudders_ , hard enough that Liam reflexively presses him harder against the wall. Groaning in response, Theo ducks his head down to bury a moan in the side of Liam’s neck. 

Liam just grins against the side of his head—Theo can feel the curve—and flexes the thigh he’d shoved between Theo’s legs when he’d dived back in. This time, Theo’s head snaps _back_ on a sharp gasp. 

“God, you look good like this,” Liam breathes. Theo rolls his head down to stare at him, mouth pleasure-slack and eyes glazed. _Liam_ moans. “I mean, christ. You _always_ look good, it’s _stupidly_ unfair, but _this—_ ” He cuts himself off. He removes his thigh from between Theo’s legs so that he can drop his right palm down instead, and _grind_ the heel of it up against Theo’s hard cock.

“What the fuck,” Theo manages to whine. “You can’t just _say—_ ”

Liam cuts him off, both with his reply and with an extra-hard pass of the heel of his hand over Theo’s cock: “Uh, I absolutely _can_. Do you know how long I’ve been _wanting_ something like this to happen?”

Theo stares down at him, stunned, but: “No way it’s longer than I’ve been,” he counters breathlessly. 

Liam stares right back at him, the pressure of his grinding hand lightening, some. “We’ll have to compare notes sometime,” he decides, a little drunkenly, and then he shifts his grip from Theo’s cock to Theo’s wrist—his _left_ wrist, and when Liam’s fingers brush the edge of the McCall stacked circles tattooed there Theo’s knees nearly _buckle_ at the surge of sensation—and starts dragging him the rest of the way down the hallway, towards the guest bedroom.

But they’re barely through the doorway when Liam spins them around so that Theo’s back is to the bed, and Liam’s facing him. Liam’s fingers immediately drop to Theo’s jeans, and he starts unbuttoning and unzipping them. Theo reaches down to try and help, but Liam just smacks his hands away, and _bites_ at the ridge of his collarbone in rebuke. Theo sucks in a sharp breath in response, but swings his arms back so that he can grip the edge of the wooden bedframe instead. It angles his chest and hips out more. It puts him, more than a little, on display for Liam between his legs.

Liam looks up at him, half-bent over as he continues working Theo’s jeans, and _grins_.

But before Theo can decide what he wants—what he’s _able_ , christ—to do about that, Liam is going to his knees, and taking Theo’s jeans, and briefs underneath, with him. They’d shed their shoes—and nearly concussed, alternatively, themselves and each other in the attempt, because they wouldn’t leave off trying to devour each other’s mouths while doing it—by the front door, and so it’s the work of the moment for Liam to encourage Theo to lift his feet, one after the other, so that Liam can pull his jeans and briefs the rest of the way off, and throw them away somewhere. He doesn’t stand back up, once he’s done.

“God, Theo,” he just murmurs, his hands rising to stroke over and then _dig_ into Theo’s thighs. Theo has to lock his knees as they start to shiver in response, and then he has to bite off a shout and literally catch himself on his arms when Liam ducks forward with no warning and _licks_ up the divot between Theo’s left thigh and his abdomen. 

“Liam, christ,” Theo pants out, and isn’t exactly sure what he’s asking for—or if he’s even asking for _anything_ —but Liam gives it to him regardless. He raises a hand, and turns his head, and uses the former to guide Theo’s hard cock into his mouth. He sinks down, his cheeks hollowing. 

Theo’s knees give up the ghost, and finish buckling. Theo winds up collapsing heavily on the edge of the bed, his fingers spasming around the frame. 

Liam just follows him, his mouth sliding even lower around Theo’s cock.

Theo spends a few helpless seconds watching the bob of his head, and the way that Liam’s lips keep managing to meet the back of his palm as he does, Liam’s hand flattened around the base of Theo’s cock, and then he has to jerk his head upwards, and stare sightlessly up at the ceiling as he pants. He’s desperately trying not to let his hips thrust. He _can’t_ help dropping a hand on the back of Liam’s head, just to _hold_.

It’s his left arm. He realizes it when Liam raises his free hand and wraps it around Theo’s forearm, and the tattoos there _sing_ in sympathetic response. “ _Ah_ , Liam!” Theo cries out, and goes down on his opposite elbow on the mattress, unable to hold himself up any longer.

Liam just grins—Theo can feel the shape of it around his cock, _christ_ —and flattens his tongue along the vein on the underside.

But just as the pleasure is starting to winch itself tight, _tight_ , at the base of Theo’s spine, Liam is pulling off of him, and staring up at him with wild eyes. Theo looks back, pleasure-dazed, but: 

“You have to fuck me,” Liam announces, and Theo _stares_. 

But Liam doesn’t give him time to fully process his announcement. He just climbs up onto the bed with Theo, over Theo’s hips and Theo’s nearly _painfully_ hard cock, the length of it still glistening wetly from Liam’s mouth, and covers Theo’s body with his own. He kisses Theo, hard and harshly and with his hands gripping either side of Theo’s face.

He pulls back just as abruptly. “I want to fuck you,” he declares, immediately sandblasting away whatever scraps of coherent thought Theo had managed to drag back together in the intervening seconds since Liam had _last_ spoke. “ _Christ_ , do I want to fuck you,” he continues, diving down to _bite_ at the side of Theo’s jaw. “And one day very soon I’m going to do that,” he promises, his hips _grinding_ against Theo’s own. “I swear, Theo, I’m going to pin you down to _whatever_ flat surface I can find— _Every_ flat surface I can find,” he corrects, a little wildly, “and fuck you through each and every one—” Theo moans, helplessly, because _what the fuck_ , “—but tonight, _you_ have to fuck _me_.”

He pulls back to look at Theo after, braced on his palms on either side of Theo’s head. 

“Do you _know_ how long I’ve wanted you to fuck me?” He wonders, the words just seeming to _spill_ out of him, just like all the others; almost confessional in nature. His expression twists a little. He dives back down to press his lips to Theo’s, one of his hands moving to grip Theo’s chin, and hold it steady. “Since the Wild Hunt, _at least_ ,” he mumbles against Theo’s lips. “That _fucking_ moment with the elevator. _Being the bait,_ ” he quotes, high and mocking. His fingers tighten _hard_ around Theo’s jaw. “Such bullshit. I couldn’t believe you.”

And that’s it: Theo can’t take it anymore. He rears up, taking Liam with him, and then _rolls_ so that Liam’s on his back on the bed, now, and Theo’s between _his_ legs. He stares down at Liam once he’s reversed their positions, searching Liam’s face. He still has no idea what to say. 

“I mean, it was probably before that,” Liam admits, unprompted. His expression screws up a little, like he’s maybe admitting something else. “At this point it just feels like I’ve always wanted you.”

There’s a conspicuous silence after that _you_. Theo had mentally started filling in _to fuck me_ , but those words don’t come. Liam leaves his sentence right where it’d landed between them: _at this point it just feels like I’ve always wanted you_. Theo can barely breathe.

“I love you,” Theo tells him, almost _blankly_ with the unvarnished truth of it. Liam’s expression slackens with surprise, and Theo’s screws up in turn. “I think I always have.”

Liam just _stares_ at him. He _isn’t_ breathing; Theo can tell, because Theo’s bare chest is pressed right up against Liam’s own. And then all at once his expression screws up just as tightly as Theo’s, and he _surges_ up to press his mouth to Theo’s, his hands gripping _tight_ on either side of Theo’s face.

“You—you asshole,” Liam complains against his mouth, breathless. “You—How can you just—” He kisses Theo again, harsh.

And then all at once, he pulls back. His eyes are back to being a little wild.

“I love you, too,” he blurts out. “I _know_ I always have.”

Theo stares down at him. He’s barely breathing. He can barely _think_ , but: “You competitive asshole,” he laughs, helpless. “You just can’t help yourself, can yo—”

He doesn’t get to finish. Liam’s eyes had widened at Theo’s laughing accusation, and then had narrowed as he’d seemed to catch on, and then he’d lunged up and kissed Theo, thereby—Theo would argue—proving Theo’s exact point. But Theo doesn’t care. Or not about _that_ , anyway; he follows the guiding pressure of Liam’s hands, and leans harder into the pressure of Liam’s mouth, and lets himself hear Liam say again: _I love you, too_.

And then he’s shoved back, Liam’s hands on his shoulders. 

“Okay, okay,” Liam pants. “Not to ruin this really beautiful moment, here,” he starts to say, and then he cuts _himself_ off as he surges back up against Theo’s mouth and mutters, “I love you, _god_ , I really do,” before falling back down, “but—”

He rolls his hips up against Theo’s own. He’s still rock hard in his jeans.

Theo _moans_. The rough drag of Liam’s jeans against his cock manages to fall right on the _pleasure_ side of pleasure-pain, and he groans and brings a hand up to cradle the side of Liam’s face as he kisses him, but: “I don’t have anything,” he confesses, frustration burring his vowels.

Liam bites at his lips, the edge of his jaw. “What kind of reformed super-spy Boy Scout _are_ you?” He complains, but the tease is clear in his voice.

Still, Theo raises up some to glare. “If you’ll cast your mind back to the fact that you _sabotaged my car_ to get yourself on this trip, maybe you’ll understand why—” Liam just grins, and interrupts him with a hard kiss. Theo groans again, and rolls his forehead against Liam’s. “Tell me _you—_ ”

Liam shakes his head. “I haven’t let myself even consider it a possibility in _years_ ,” he replies. His tone is easy enough, but Theo still pulls back to look at him, brow furrowed and mouth slack with—the beginnings of guilt, maybe, or at least shame. Liam strokes a gentle hand down the side of his face, but doesn’t take it back, or try to soften the sting of it. 

Theo feels his expression twist. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, ducking down to press the words to Liam’s cheek.

But Liam just turns into him, turning it into a kiss. “No,” he disagrees, tongue firmly burrowing into his cheek. “You _love_ me.”

It’s not the most sensical counter-argument but Theo could not care less. He traces light fingertips over the opposite side of Liam’s face. He says, “Yeah, I do,” quiet and aching a little with the feeling of it expanding throughout his chest.

“Not to mention,” Liam continues, his grin going a little sly from where he’d turned to press his mouth to Theo’s stroking fingertips, “ _Stiles_ lives in this house. There’s no _way—_ ” 

He pushes lightly at Theo’s shoulders as he says it, and then scrambles out from underneath him and towards the head of the bed without finishing. Theo watches him, brow furrowing, and then he abruptly understands when Liam gets his fingers hooked in the drawer of the nightstand by the bed, and pulls it open. Still, Theo leaves him to digging around in it and just follows him up the bed, dragging his nose up Liam’s bare spine from the waist of his jeans and stopping at various points to press little bites into Liam’s skin. Liam pauses in his search and just _pants_ , his head twisting slightly back over his shoulder as Theo reaches the top of his spine so that Theo can lean sideways, and kiss him.

But the rustling noises of Liam digging through the drawer pick up again fast, and then Liam gives a victorious little cry and pulls back from Theo’s mouth at the same time that he yanks a little bottle out of the drawer. But then they both stop, and stare at it.

“Is that a _bow?_ ” Theo asks eventually, because either the last half-hour has broken his brain with its unexpected developments, or there really is a garish red bow attached to the top of the lube bottle. 

“There’s a message,” Liam realizes blankly, turning the bottle over.

He’s right: there’s a post-it note stuck to the back. Theo leans a little further over Liam’s shoulder so that he can better read it.

“That asshole,” Liam opines seconds later, sounding a baffled mix of insulted and just delightfully, helpfully amused.

 _ **For T & L**_ **,** the note reads, scrawled in Stiles’ spiky handwriting, _**But ONLY**_ —and that _only_ is underlined several times— _ **if you pull your heads out of your asses. :)**_

Theo drops his head to the back of Liam’s shoulder, and _laughs_.

Liam twists around to glare at him; Theo can’t see it, but he can sense it. “I’m not thanking him,” he declares. “I’m not!” He insists, when that just causes Theo to laugh harder.

“Shit,” Theo manages to gasp out, still shaking with laughter. He reaches up and snags the bottle from Liam, bow and post-it note and all, and rears up. “ _I_ will.” 

He gets his other hand gripped in the fabric of Liam’s jeans, and uses the hold to yank Liam further down the bed, and then roll him over, onto his back. Liam blinks up at him once he’s there, and then his expression goes a little tight. “Okay,” he agrees. “Maybe I will.”

He lunges up and captures Theo’s mouth. Theo groans and follows him back down as Liam drops back flat, and then he leaves the little bottle of gifted lube with its ridiculous red bow somewhere off to the side, his hands tangling with Liam’s as they both reach for Liam’s fly, and start working his jeans, and briefs off his hips. Probably one or both of them should stop kissing the other—the process would certainly be improved in terms of efficiency, if nothing else—but they don’t, and Theo takes a knee to the side and nearly knocks his shoulder into Liam’s nose before they finally, successfully, manage to wrestle Liam’s jeans and briefs off, and away.

“Oh, my god,” Liam moans, when Theo pins him back flat. He thrusts his _finally_ naked cock up against Theo’s own, once, twice, and then _again_ when he manages to twist his hips just enough to slot it into the groove between Theo’s hip and thigh. Echoing his moan, Theo drops a hand to his hip and encourages him to do it _again_ , to do it harder. He’d be A-okay if Liam wanted to come just like that.

But Liam wraps his legs around Theo’s waist at one point, stilling them both. “Okay,” he pants. “Okay, enough horsing around.” He smacks a hand against Theo’s shoulder. “Onto the main event.”

Theo gives him a slightly incredulous—and not-so-secretly _fond_ —look. “Such a romantic,” he deadpans.

He also winces and exclaims _ow, Liam, hey_ , rolling slightly onto his side so that he can shell up when Liam just makes a noise of outrage and hits him again. He spends a few flailing moments trying to capture Liam’s hands, and it’s only after he’s done that, that he rolls back fully over Liam, his hands pinning Liam’s wrists to either side of Liam’s head. Liam stares up at him.

“This still doesn’t seem real,” Liam announces, and then his expression twists apologetically. 

Theo feels his own expression twist. But then—instead of pulling back, or apologizing again—he leans down, _covering_ Liam’s body with his own. He presses his lips _hard_ to Liam’s. 

“It’s real,” he murmurs against Liam’s mouth when he pulls back. “It’s real, I promise,” and then, his mouth curling in a sly little grin, he adds, “If it wasn’t we wouldn’t get to use _this_.” 

He pats a hand around until he finds the bottle of lube that he’d abandoned earlier, and holds it up with a pointed little wiggle; the bow on the side is a little crushed now, and sad—they’d definitely rolled over onto it at some point—but it still gets his point across. Liam’s eyes still crinkle with the force of his answering grin.

“Now who’s the romantic,” he deadpans, kicking Theo lightly in the thigh.

Theo doesn’t answer, just grins wider and leans down and kisses him, slow and searching and deep. He also shifts so that he’s bracing himself on his left elbow, and with his right, he flicks open the cap to the little bottle.

Liam must hear it; he _moans_ against Theo’s mouth.

But he also lifts his leg, and circles it wide, up and over Theo’s forearm before bracing it on Theo’s hip. Theo groans and takes full, intended advantage, dropping his slick fingers to Liam’s rim and just _stroking_ for a moment, firm and deliberate but not enough to press _in_. Liam whines, and bucks up. Theo stops _horsing around_ ; he shifts the position of his hand, and presses one finger inside Liam’s entrance in a slow, steady slide. 

“Oh, _fuck_ , that’s good,” Liam opines drunkenly, shuddering a little. He arches his head back just enough to expose the ridge of his throat, and Theo dives down to put his teeth to it as he starts to thrust his finger in, and out.

It doesn’t take long for Liam to be ready for a second finger. Liam doesn’t _let_ it take long; he jams the foot he still has against Theo’s hip even harder against the bone, and _bites_ Theo’s lower lip between his teeth, and Theo groans and takes it for the instruction it is, and adds a second. Liam arches back as he does, his foot flexing against Theo’s side, and he lets out a long, broken moan as Theo’s last knuckles brush up against the rim of his ass. 

“I love your hands,” he manages, his hips writhing a bit as Theo starts to thrust his fingers again. “God, have I ever told you that? I just, _fuck_. Really love your hands. Used to—to imagine this, _all_ the time.”

“God, _Liam_ ,” Theo complains brokenly, heat bolting up and then right back down his spine, driving his hips down against the mattress, and Liam’s other thigh half sprawled between them.

“Malia got so sick of it, she used to threaten that she’d lock you in a closet with me, just to get it out of my system,” Liam continues, either oblivious to the helpless whine Theo bites off in response or _because_ of the helpless whine Theo bites off in response. “Probably—probably a good thing that she didn’t.” He drops his head low. He meets Theo’s eyes, and as heavy-lidded as his own are, they’re still sharp on Theo’s face; still knowing.

“Probably,” Theo agrees softly. Probably he and Liam had needed all the intervening years between then and now to figure themselves, and each other, out. And even if they hadn’t, well—all the intervening years had already passed, hadn’t they? 

He lets it go. He sees Liam do the same. 

He adds, when he’s sure Liam’s ready for it, a third finger. Liam _whines_ , and brings up his hands to flatten against and then clutch at Theo’s back, his shoulders. He presses his forehead up against Theo’s own. “God, Theo,” he breathes, his hips rocking back against Theo’s hand. “Please. _Please._ ”

“Ready?” Theo asks him, low and desperate. He’s almost positive the answer is _yes_ —he can feel the easy glide of his slick fingers—but he wants to hear Liam _say it_. “Liam, tell me if you’re—”

“Yes, _god_ ,” Liam bursts out, and then he apparently gets impatient enough with the literal _split-second_ he gives Theo to react, and decides to take care of it himself; he lifts the foot he’d had on Theo’s hip, and braces it on Theo’s forearm instead, and _shoves_ it back. Theo’s fingers slide out of him, Theo making a small, surprised noise, for the single heartbeat it takes for his expression to go dry, instead.

Liam looks the _opposite_ of apologetic. He beats Theo to the lube bottle, both the post-it note and the bow lost somewhere in the covers—chances that one or both of them roll over one or the other at the world’s most inopportune time: high—and gets the cap flicked open, and the fingers of one hand covered in lube. He reaches down and gets his slicked hand around Theo’s cock.

“Jesus _christ_ ,” Theo gasps out, high and harsh, his hips bucking into Liam’s grip. Liam gives him one, two, three quick thrusts, and then he pinches his knees on either side of Theo’s ribs, and uses them along with his fingers around Theo’s cock to guide Theo to his entrance. His hips cant up. 

Theo considers resisting—maybe just to be an asshole, maybe because he and Liam, both separately and together, have issues with jumping the proverbial gun, and at least _one_ of them should make sure they’re thinking clearly—but. But he’s just— _done_ resisting Liam, in every way imaginable. 

He lets Liam guide him forward.

“ _Oh,_ ” Liam groans, long and drawn-out, as Theo presses deeper, and deeper, inside of him. He removes his hands, but keeps using his knees as guides. He uses his heels, too, driving them against Theo’s lower back until Theo is fully seated inside him. “ _Fuck_ ,” he concludes, once Theo is pressed up flush to his ass.

“Yeah,” Theo agrees, a little drunk on the heat, and the tightness, and the slick press of their skin together, but even _more_ than that: on how every one of his breaths is saturated with Liam’s scent, his lungs filling up with it and filling up his chest in turn; on how he can feel Liam’s heart beating right up against his own, their chests pressed together. He burrows his face against the side of Liam’s neck, and gives a broken moan.

Liam must sense that he’s having some kind of moment, because where he’d been relentless before, he does nothing but wrap his legs even tighter around Theo’s waist, and trail his fingers lightly over Theo’s back, in response. He turns his head, after a moment, and presses his lips to Theo’s forearm, braced by his head. 

Theo’s _left_ forearm, and it’s not an accident; Liam looks up at him after, his mouth still pressed against the McCall stacked circles tattooed on his skin, and then he very deliberately closes his lips, and teeth, over the first of the circles. Theo _gasps_. He holds himself very still as Liam lifts his head just enough that he can repeat the gesture on the second circle. 

He collapses down onto his elbow to put the Argent fleur-de-lis in closer reach, and watches with bated breath as Liam turns his head to bite one last time at the stark black whirls, and lines. He stares down at Liam, once Liam’s done.

Liam stares back, and then he very carefully lifts his hands, and sets them on either side of Theo’s face, and pulls Theo down to kiss him, slow and deep and methodically.

“I love you,” he murmurs against Theo’s mouth, and then he wraps his arms _tight_ around Theo’s shoulders, and buries his face _hard_ against the side of Theo’s neck, and wraps his legs more completely around Theo’s waist. 

Theo turns his face into the side of Liam’s and just breathes for one heartbeat, two, and then he starts to _move._

Immediately, Liam’s already-tight grip tightens that impossibly much more. He cries out, the sound of it half-muffled from his mouth still buried against Theo’s skin, and Theo moans in turn. He rolls his hips again. He rolls his hips _again._

It doesn’t take them long to find a rhythm. Theo thrusts down and Liam raises his hips up to meet him, his heels digging into Theo’s back and pressing him in _harder_ , in _deeper_. His fingers around Theo’s back clench, and _drag_ against Theo’s shoulders. Theo drops his own hands to either side of Liam’s hips and _grips_ , using them to cant Liam’s hips up further and change the angle just that much more.

He gets what he’d wanted; Liam _jolts_ , his nails against Theo’s back taking on a hint of supernatural sharpness, and then he seems to _melt_ back against the bed. “Fuck,” he groans. “Fuck, fuck. _Theo_.”

Theo makes sure to hit that spot inside of Liam again, and again. Liam’s having more trouble following their rhythm in response but to Theo that’s just a _victory_ ; he takes advantage of Liam’s sudden pliability to drag him even further down the bed, tilting his hips up even _more_ so that he can drive down harder. Liam cries out, his hands slapping down to the bedspread from Theo’s back and _gripping_ there. He twists it hard enough that Theo briefly wonders if he’s going to rip it before deciding he really, _really_ doesn’t care.

“Theo,” Liam manages, half a whine. “Theo, I’m—”

And Theo knows what _Liam is_ , so he takes one hand off of Liam’s hips and snakes it between their bodies so that he can palm Liam’s cock, and stroke it in time with his thrusts. Liam cries out, long and loud, his body jackknifing best it can with how folded-up Theo has him, and then he comes on an even longer, louder cry.

Theo strokes him through it. He _fucks_ him through it.

And then, as he feels Liam start to relax underneath him, his body going loose and pliant with his orgasm, he stops, and presses his face hard to the side of Liam’s face. “Liam,” he begs, breathy and desperate. “Liam, can I—?”

“Literally anything,” Liam answers, more than a little drunk-sounding. “ _Textbook_ definition of literally anything, just go—go—”

He doesn’t complete his sentence. That might be because Theo pulls out of him, causing Liam to hiccup in a surprised, sharp sound, and then _rolls_ him, so that Liam’s on his stomach. Liam catches on, then, and even with how loose and languid his body is, he still brings both hands up to clutch at the bedspread and pillows below his head as he bites out, “ _Christ_ , yes.”

Theo presses back inside him in one smooth, slick thrust, and then _plasters_ himself across Liam’s back, his hands coming up to find and then thread his fingers through Liam’s own. 

His tattoos brush Liam’s skin as he does it. The added sensation causes him to moan, shaky and helpless, and thrust _harder_.

But it isn’t long before the pressure at the base of his own spine winches tight, and then _too_ tight; Theo presses up _flush_ against Liam’s ass as he comes, his hips giving these last, helpless little thrusts as he does. Below him, Liam gives a broken moan in turn, and twists his head around to press his mouth to the corner of Theo’s, to Theo’s cheek, to anything Liam can reach as Theo gasps through the last vestiges of his own orgasm.

Finally he’s able to turn his head, and catch one of Liam’s kisses. Liam groans into it, quiet, and kisses him back, his fingers spasming around Theo’s own. 

But Theo can tell from the short, shallow breaths that Liam’s taking that he’s crushing Liam, a little bit. Pressing the side of his forehead against Liam’s in warning, Theo slowly, carefully pulls out of his body, and then collapses to Liam’s side with a rough, heartfelt groan. Liam almost immediately rolls to follow him, so that they’re lying side by side on their backs, staring up at the ceiling.

They lay there in a quiet, easy silence, just letting their breathing return to even, and then all at once Liam starts to _laugh_. Theo feels his brow furrow, and he lifts his head so that he can turn it, and set it back down facing Liam. Liam notices him looking and glances over in turn, but that only seems to make him laugh _harder_ ; he’s practically guffawing, and he curls up a little like a pill-bug towards Theo as he does it.

Theo gives the top of his head a dry look, and then he reaches over to dig a finger into Liam’s sternum as he says, deliberately quoting Liam earlier: “Can I buy a vowel or phone a friend or something, here? What’s wrong with you?” He keeps digging his finger deeper into Liam’s chest until Liam protests and squirms away, still breathlessly laughing. 

Rolling his eyes and giving up, Theo rolls over to follow him, and just swallows Liam’s continued laughter with his mouth. Liam kisses him back in between breathless gasps for air, his body still shaking with silent amusement, and then he pulls back, digging the back of his head a little into the mattress so that he can actually look up at Theo hovering over him, and meet his eyes.

“It’s just,” he starts, and has to stop to snort a quiet laugh, and shake through it for a few seconds before he manages to regain control of himself. “It’s just, it only took us, what—like six years and three thousand miles to—” he casts a hand out, and Theo has no idea what he’s looking for until he comes up with Stiles’ _severely_ crumpled post-it note, “‘get our heads out of our asses?’” He quotes, and then grins even as he’s laughing _and_ leaning up to kiss Theo again.

Theo lets him get away with it for exactly three seconds, and then he pulls back. “More like three thousand and three hundred, with the detours,” he points out. He’s grinning even as he says it, the corners of his eyes crinkling up.

Liam grins back, laughing silently again, and then his expression sobers, some. He brings a hand up to stroke gentle fingers down the side of Theo’s face. He searches it, his eyes flicking from the curve of Theo’s cheeks to the line of his jaw to the dip between his eyebrows, Liam running the tip of his finger over it, bumping it down and over Theo’s nose to his lips. He leans up, and kisses Theo, soft and slow, and then flops back down to the mattress.

“Worth it,” he declares, and _grins_. 

\---

Lydia ends up staying over at her friend’s house— _too much wine_ , her text message had read, but Theo had thought of Stiles’ post-it note message and had immediately concluded _collusion_ —and so Theo and Liam jointly make the mistake of thinking that they’re going to be able to keep the newest development regarding their relationship to themselves, at least for a full twelve hours.

That misconception is swiftly corrected when Lydia swans back into the house the next morning, takes one look at Theo and Liam—stood on opposite sides of the kitchen island, even!—and snorts. “About goddamn time,” she declares.

“What!” Liam yelps, “We’re not even standing anywhere _near_ each other!,” thereby just _decimating_ whatever deniability they may have had left.

“You don’t _need_ to be,” Lydia counters, and then doesn’t bother to elaborate on that baffling statement in the slightest. She lifts up the bag she’d been holding, and drops it onto the granite of the island. Theo recognizes the weighty _thunk_ of a full tub of cream cheese, and a duller rustle of parchment paper between freshly-baked—Theo can smell them—bagels before he recognizes the logo on the side. 

Liam immediately forgets his irritation at being so completely caught out, and practically _lunges_ for the bag. Theo likes having all his fingers attached to his body, so he resigns himself to waiting until Liam’s done tearing through the bag like some kind of half-starved hyena to try and claim his own breakfast. He does accept the paper cup full of coffee that Lydia offers him, though. 

“What gave us away?” He asks her as she hands it over, quietly enough that Liam might not overhear; Liam already has half an untoasted bagel stuffed in his mouth and is carrying the other half over to the toaster with a look of singular focus, but who knows: Liam’s full of surprises. He keeps surprising _Theo_ , anyway.

Lydia just smiles, and softly. “You’re smiling,” she tells him, just as quietly. Her eyes flick to Liam, and back. “You both are. _Real_ smiles.”

Theo feels himself flush even as he feels something like _gratitude_ rush hot and liquid down his spine. Lydia finishes handing over his coffee and then presses her now-empty hand to his arm, before stepping around him on her way to the fridge. She pulls out a yogurt, and then leans over to seamlessly pluck the bagel half that Liam had just finished painstakingly slathering with cream cheese from Liam’s hands.

“Hey!” Liam protests, but at Lydia’s raised, challenging eyebrow, he just rolls his eyes and dives back into the bag for another. Trading a victorious smirk with Theo, Lydia braces one hand on the kitchen counter opposite the island and uses it to boost herself up.

Once settled, she takes a bite of Liam’s former-bagel and requests, “Just do me a favor, and hold off confessing to Stiles for as long as possible.” She grins wickedly after she’s chewed, and swallowed, her mouthful. “He kept texting me for updates last night, and Derek said he’s been practically foaming at the mouth to know whether or not he was right about—”

“—us getting our heads out of asses?” Theo fills in dryly. Liam _snorts_ , still elbow deep in the bag as he apparently sorts through the selection of bagels there for a replacement. Lydia laughs, high and melodic. 

“Yeah,” she agrees easily, and smiles softly over at Theo again. “That.”

Theo ends up heading back to campus with Lydia once they finish eating—“I”m _relatively_ confident that I’ve configured the artifact right, and I’m not about to cause a massive destabilization of the ley lines, but it doesn’t hurt to have someone double-check,” she’d told him, and Theo had snorted a laugh and agreed—but Liam had decided against going with them.

“I should probably head back to the Kollmanns,” he’d said, stood by Theo at the front door as Theo and Lydia had been getting ready to leave. “I think they were worried I was going to like, throw myself into the sea, or something equally dramatic.”

Theo had just done his level best to keep a smirk off his face, and had mostly failed. “Sounds like they’d nailed your psyche.” Liam had faked a laugh, and then he’d just—taken Theo’s head between his hands, and kissed him long and slow and deep. 

Lydia had given them precisely half a minute—Theo’s relatively sure she’d literally been watching the decorative clock on the wall—and then she’d loudly clapped her hands to break them up. 

So Liam had ended up taking Theo’s car to go see the Kollmanns, and Theo had gone with Lydia to go assist with her experiment. He spends the rest of the day cloistered in her lab with her—she even finds him a white lab coat to wear, and Theo honestly can’t tell if it’s because he needs it or because she thinks she’s funny—as they check, and double-check, and triple-check the parameters and set-up of her experiment. It’s edging towards late afternoon by the time they finish.

When they get back to the house, Liam is in the kitchen and in the middle of chopping an onion on a wooden cutting board that he’d clearly retrieved from its stand in the corner of one of the counters. There’s a pile of tomatoes next to the board.

“Are you _cooking?_ ” Theo asks incredulously as he and Lydia make it through the front door, and begin heeling off their shoes on the mat reserved for that purpose. He leaves Lydia hanging her bag on its designated hook, and goes to investigate.

“I mean, it’s meat sauce,” Liam replies, as Theo rounds the island and peers over his shoulder at the pile of Liam’s ingredients. “It’s browning ground beef and successfully boiling a pot of water, so, y’know. Don’t give me too much credit.”

He twists his head to look over his shoulder at Theo as he does it. His words aside, he’s grinning, and flushing a little. Theo can’t help it; he leans forward, and kisses him.

“Dunbar, you sneaky goddamn liar!” Stiles’ voice suddenly squawks from—somewhere. Theo startles backwards and looks a little wildly around, and only then realizes that Liam’s tablet is propped up on the edge of the island. Stiles glares at him—them both, really—through the video call.

Liam just smirks, and twists back around to face the tablet. “I didn’t _lie_ ,” he counters, waving the chef’s knife in his hand around a little pointedly. Theo grimaces and reaches over to retrieve it from him, and then hip-checks Liam out of the way so he can take over chopping, since there’s no way that Liam isn’t going to say something like: “I just didn’t say _yes_ to all your probing and frankly _invasive_ questions,” thereby escalating the squabble further.

“Oh, ho!” Stiles just snarks back. “Probably because you wish you were being _probed_ by something el—ow!” He cuts off as a hand enters the frame, and smacks him up the back of the head.

Liam cackles as Derek’s face enters the frame. Theo just rolls his eyes and then has to quickly blink them several times as they start to water; goddamn onion. Behind him, Lydia sweeps by, stops to critically examine the ingredients Liam had laid out, and then disappears and reappears shortly after with a few extra bottles of spices. Theo smirks, but nods his thanks.

On the call, Derek is valiantly trying to retrieve Stiles’ phone so he can steady it and ask Lydia something, but Stiles is—for whatever _Stiles_ reason he has—determinedly keeping it away from him, one hand smooshing one of Derek’s cheeks as Stiles holds him at bay. Through the wildly vacillating picture, Theo can catch there-and-gone glimpses of Alec, sat at a picnic-table-looking-thing of some sort and grinning bemusedly.

They end up staying on the video call throughout dinner—Lydia at one point going on a scavenger hunt through the myriad drawers in the kitchen, all while yelling exasperated questions at Stiles about _where the hell did you put the charging cables, they’re not in the usual spot_ —when Liam’s tablet battery starts to die. They end up clustered on one side of Lydia’s and Stiles’ and Derek’s kitchen table once they dish up Liam’s meat sauce so that they can all fit in frame, and Derek eventually wins his battle to claim Stiles’ phone so that they can see Stiles, Derek, and Alec at the same time, too.

They’re at a rest stop of some kind. Car alarms and slamming doors and random yelling keep sounding in the background, but Alec’s teeth and nails stay human. His eyes only flicker gold once or twice. Theo notices, and then notices _Liam_ noticing, and elbows him under the table; Liam glances at him, and grins, soft and secret.

“Jesus, I _knew_ you two were going to be unbearable once you finally pulled your heads out of your asses,” Stiles comments, though only _after_ he’s made a series of exaggerated gagging noises. 

Liam’s soft smile goes wicked, and he _lunges_ for Theo instead, kissing him deliberately sloppy and wet as Theo catches him with a surprised sound and a laugh. Stiles’ protesting cry is less exaggerated, then. Liam pulls back, and tells him, “That’s what’s called a _self-inflicted wound_. You know,” he adds, adopting a thoughtful expression, “I think I might frame that post-it note.”

He could, in fact; he _had_ kept it. Theo had laughed and shaken his head when he’d watched Liam snag it and tuck it into his bag, last night.

“Ugh,” Stiles just replies, then, loftily: “It was a sacrifice I had to make for the benefit of the pack. You two were being fucking _absurd._ ”

Halfway through dinner, Scott calls. There’s a chaotic few minutes where Liam tries and fails to figure out how to merge the video calls—nearly hanging up on all parties multiple times—before Lydia literally _drags_ him aside by the back of his collar, and does it herself. Malia pops into the call when she hears the numerous voices, and at that point, all hell breaks loose; invitations to join go out to Mason, who luckily is already with Corey, as well as Parrish and the Sheriff—still at the station—and Ms. McCall and Argent, the former at the hospital and the latter—somewhere. He refuses to tell anyone where, but Theo gets the sense it’s more because he finds the pack’s wild guesses amusing, and not because he’s actually somewhere worth talking about.

They stay on the video call until late. 

But they eventually wrap up—Lydia’s and Theo’s and Liam’s eyes all starting to get heavy, given the time difference—and say a long, protracted, constantly-mooted goodbye as someone exclaims and brings up something new, or remembers a question that they’d forgot they needed to ask someone else. Theo gives up at one point, and gathers up his and Lydia’s and Liam’s plates, and takes them over to the sink to start doing the dishes. Liam rises to help him, yelling something snarky back at Stiles when he makes an insinuating comment about both of them disappearing from frame.

Once she actually manages to hang up, Lydia comes to hover over their shoulders at the sink, and look critically around at the remaining dishes. “We’ve got this,” Theo tells her. Lydia smiles in thanks, and squeezes first his arm and then Liam’s as she wishes them a good night, and goes to head up to hers and Stiles’ and Derek’s bedroom.

Theo keeps scrubbing the pot he’d been working on. Liam retrieves the last dish—the sauce pan he’d used to brown and simmer the meat sauce—and then he hops up onto the counter next to the sink once he’s handed it over, and Theo has gently nudged him aside when Liam goes to help. He kicks his feet lightly in the air, his fingers wrapped loosely around the counter. His silence isn’t exactly _anxious,_ but it’s expectant. Theo concentrates on the sponge in his hand, and gives Liam the time he needs.

“So I was thinking—” Liam finally starts.

“Oh, this again?” Theo can’t help but interrupt, tongue in his cheek. He grins up at Liam when Liam squints and then glares, clearly remembering the same thing that Theo had—Liam at the station before Theo had even left, the first volley in Liam inviting himself along on Theo’s trip: _so I was thinking…_

“Ha, ha,” Liam deadpans, and swings a foot over to dig it into Theo’s side. Theo squawks and squirms away from him, and then deliberately flicks soapy water at him. _Liam_ squawks, then, and wipes a streak of bubbles off his cheek.

But: “You were thinking?” Theo prompts, after they’ve both settled a little.

Liam jolts. “Yeah,” he replies, automatic. His expression pinches a little, his bottom lip folding between his teeth and his gaze jerking down to his feet. He darts a look at Theo, and chews his lip harder. “Yeah, I was thinking…” 

He trails off. He hops down from the counter, and comes to stand in front of Theo, looking up at him, the look on his face a soft sort of intense. His eyes search Theo’s.

“I was thinking I know we have to go back to Beacon Hills. I _want_ to go back to Beacon Hills,” he adds. “To go _home_ ,” he insists firmly, clearly thinking of their conversation last night on the porch. 

“But?” Theo fills in quietly, when Liam doesn’t finish right away. He’d stopped washing the pot, his hands still soapy but still in the sink as he waits.

Liam’s lips flicker in response. His lip had still been between his teeth, but when he smiles it slips out, bitten and red. “But I was thinking,” he picks back up, his eyes flicking back and forth between Theo’s own, “that maybe you and me could—get a little lost, on the way?”

Theo feels his heart— _Tara’s_ heart—drop first down into his stomach, and then immediately switch directions and _soar_. The smile that breaks over his face is wide, and wondering, and entirely beyond his control. He brings his hands up—still soapy, but he doesn’t care, and apparently neither does Liam, since Liam just instantly presses into them—and drags Liam’s mouth to his.

“Yeah,” he breathes against Liam’s mouth, when he pulls back. “Yeah. Let’s get a little lost on the way.”

The corner of his eyes crinkle with the force of his grin. Liam’s crinkle right back.

**Author's Note:**

> All feedback loved! If you liked, please consider a comment or a [reblog](https://eneiryu.tumblr.com/post/623167557901418496/followed-the-telegraph-wires-to-the-map-to-your)!


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